Chicago: City on the Make Quotes

“An October sort of city even in spring.”

“For always our villains have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted.”

“Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little while.”

“Chicago: City on the Make”

“These are the pavement-colored thousands of the great city's nighttime streets, a separate race with no place to go and the whole long night to kill.”

“In books such as Chicago: City on the Make (1951) his writing continued to talk of the dark underbelly of the USA, in a voice ever richer and darker.”

“Every day is D-day under the El.”

“Giants lived here once. It was the kind of town, thirty years gone, that made big men out of little ones. It was geared for great deeds then, as it is geared for small deeds now.”

“Looking at Chicago after reading Chicago: City on the Make is like looking at sunflowers after seeing the Van Gogh painting – the subject has changed because of the artist's vision.”

“However do senators get so close to God? How is it that front-office men never conspire? That matinee idols feel such guilt? Or that winners never pitch in a bill toward the price of their victory?”

“It's hustle and bustle from day to day, chicken one day and feathers the next, and nobody knows where O'Connor went.”

“Algren's Chicago, a kind of American annex to Dante's inferno, is a nether world peopled by rat-faced hustlers and money-loving demons who crawl in the writer's brilliant, sordid, uncompromising and twisted imagination.”

“Yankee and voyageur, the Irish and the Dutch, Indian traders and Indian agents, halfbreed and quarterbreed and no breed at all, in the final counting they were all of a single breed. They all had hustler's blood.”

“Good times or hard, it's still an infidel's capital six days a week. / [...] Where only yesterday the evening crow crossed only lonely teepee fires, now the slender arc-lamps burn. / To reveal our backstreets to the indifferent stars.”

“In the Indian grass the Indians listened: [...] the first sounds of a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. [...] / That was to forge, out of steel and blood-red neon, its own particular wilderness.”

“It's every man for himself in this hired air. / Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

“If my City of the Big Shoulders / Stormy, husky, bawling / Yipping, yapping, yessing, crawling / Would only stop giggling like a farm-boy wearing earrings / On North Wells Street for the first time / Maybe we could find out what kind of joint we're living in.”

“What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. And in that prose-poem put down some twenty-odd years ago – and what odd years they've been – the ring of a city's awful truth is still heard. Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet.”

“It's still an outlaw's capital – but of an outlawry whose colors, once crimson as the old Sauganash whiskey-dye, have been washed down, by many prairie rains, to the colorless grey of the self-made executive type playing the percentages from the inside. Under the pale fluorescent glow.”

“I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity. [...] The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.”