Thoughts on { Taxi | Allen Ginsberg / Elizabeth Bowen / Haruki Murakami / Graham Greene / J.G. Ballard / F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ryo Takemasa, Taxi, New York, 2011

“If, in New York, you arrive late for an appointment, say, “I took a taxi”.

Andre Maurois, 1885-1967

“Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load
past watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts.

Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads don’t talk
Look bony skulls and silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise.”

Allen Ginsberg, September on Jessore Road, 1971

“Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.”

Elizabeth Bowen, 1899-1973

“I wander though China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokoyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi… all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn’t a place for me.”

Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes, 1993

“In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.”

> Graham Greene, The End of the Affair, 1951

‘What was being on the moon literally like?’ […] ‘Being on the moon?’ His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. ‘It was just like being here.’

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

“This is what you do on your very first day in Paris. You get yourself, not a drizzle, but some honest-to-goodness rain, and you find yourself someone really nice and drive her through the Bois de Boulogne in a taxi. The rain’s very important. That’s when Paris smells its sweetest. It’s the damp chestnut trees.”

Audrey Hepburn, 1929-1993

“Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.”

John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1974

“And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, 1945