Rail Quotes

“Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any country. It is too tedious.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress

“Zoe returned by rail to Claremont Village. After the train pulled away, she stood alone, beneath a security camera affixed to a lamppost. She looked up, and its lifeless eye looked straight back. In some uncontrollable fancy she turned and curtseyed, imagining someone wonderful on the other side of the lens would be captivated by her new American dress.”
― Michael Benzehabe

“What happens when a leader misses his steps on the ladder is what happens when a train misses the rail. Be on track.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder

“Rail longer than train cars ; and the hope than our reasons. (Rail plus long que les wagons ; - Et l'espoir que nos raisons.)”
― Charles de Leusse

“There are two useful types of meetings: alignment meetings and creation meetings . Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails.”
― Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager