A stone had smashed into Jimmie’s mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. (from “Maggie,” pages 7-8)

The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.

(from “Maggie,” page 22)

“Teh hell wid him and you,” she said, glowering at her daughter in the gloom. Her eyes seemed to burn balefully. “Yeh’ve gone teh deh devil, Mag Johnson, yehs knows yehs have gone teh deh devil. Yer a disgrace teh yer people, damn yeh.” (from “Maggie,” page 39)

As the girl timidly accosted him, he gave a convulsive movement and saved his respectability by a vigorous sidestep. He did not risk it to save a soul. For how was he to know that there was a soul before him that needed saving? (from “Maggie,” page 64)

“I know he ain’t th’ kind a man I’d like t’ have you go around with. He ain’t a good man. I’m sure he ain’t. He drinks.”

(from “George’s Mother,” page 82)

He remembered Jones. He could not help but admire a man who knew so many bartenders. (from “George’s Mother,” page 93)

For three days they lived in silence. He brooded upon his mother’s agony and felt a singular joy in it.

(from “George’s Mother,” page .119)

From the dark and secret places of the building there suddenly came to his nostrils strange and unspeakable odors that assailed him like malignant diseases with wings. They seemed to be from human bodies closely packed in dens; the exhalations from a hundred pairs of reeking lips; the fumes from a thousand bygone debauches; the expression of a thousand present miseries.

(from “An Experiment in Misery,” page 138)

“I have been told all my life that millionaires have no fun, and I know that the poor are always assured that the millionaire is a very unhappy person.” (from “An Experiment in Luxury,” pages 145-146)

“Humanity only needs to be provided for ten minutes with a few whirligigs and things of the sort, and it can forget at least four centuries of misery. I rejoice in these whirligigs.”

(from “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” page 165)

And who should invade this momentary land of rest, this dream country, if not the people of the Tenderloin; they who are at once supersensitive and hopeless, the people who think more upon death and the mysteries of life, the chances of the hereafter than any other class, educated or uneducated? Opium holds out to them its lie, and they embrace it eagerly. (from “Opium’s Varied Dreams,” page 195)

The bicycle crowd has completely subjugated the street. The glittering wheels dominate it from end to end. The cafes and dining rooms or the apartment hotels are occupied mainly by people in bicycle clothes. Even the billboards have surrendered.

(from “New York’s Bicycle Speedway,” page 196)