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1 " My mother’s father, Grandfather Thieme, the son of a railroad engineer, looked quite dapper as a young man. Prior to 1933 the Hamburg Police Department consisted of 21 units, with 2,100 men. My grandfather was a Polizist with the Sicherheitspolizei or uniformed policeman with the department. Later, with an expansion of the Hamburg Police Department to 5,500 men and the formation of an investigative branch, he was promoted to the esteemed position of a Kriminalbeamte inspector. He rose to the rank of Chief of Detectives, and had a reputation of being tough, and not someone you could mess with. Having a baldhead and the general appearance of Telly Savalas, the late Hollywood movie actor, I don’t think anyone did. An action story and part of my grandfather’s legacy was when he chased a felon across the rooftops of prewar Hamburg, firing his Dienstpistole, service revolver, as he made his way from one steep inclined slate roof to the next.Of course, Grandpa got his man! Even with this factual tidbit, there isn’t all that much I know about him, other than that, at the then ripe old age of sixty-four, he peacefully died in his chair while reading the evening newspaper. "
― Hank Bracker
2 " People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all. "
― Milan Kundera , The Joke
3 " I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure. "
― Roman Payne , Rooftop Soliloquy
4 " I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, " Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?" Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously. "
5 " Help me, Mikey, she wanted to say. I’m afraid. More afraid than you’d ever believe.’ And he’d take her hand and they’d fly across the rooftops and up into space and sit on some planet and watch a double sunrise or maybe a star being born or some other event that no human had ever seen, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. And she’d tell him everything. "
― , You Against Me
6 " I sailed on the cold air currents above the rooftops of Paris. I could see the river, the Louvre Museum, the gardens and palaces. And a mouse-yum. Hang on, Carter, I thought. not hunting mice. "
― Rick Riordan , The Red Pyramid (The Kane Chronicles, #1)
7 " ...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars. "
― Tana French , In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)
8 " As he left, he saw the streets were just as deserted and quiet as before, but now he knew it was an illusion. There were ninjas, darker than a starless night, watching their territory and his every move from the rooftops high above. "
― Anam Iqbal , The Whyte Divide
9 " There seemed to be handfuls of stars tossed right above the rooftops in Haddan, keeping the town still alight at midnight. "
― Alice Hoffman , The River King
10 " What strange and thoughtless creatures we were, back in those days. We would go up to the rooftops to smoke, Wurth and I; and there in the company of other insomniac souls we would look out at the vast expanse of lights and glamour. We watched the towers as they climbed higher, and higher, as humanity reached for the skies. "
― Yudhanjaya Wijeratne , Numbercaste
11 " There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose--a gleaming, round saucer--over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul--or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon. "
― Haruki Murakami , 1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3)
12 " How could anarchy be any worse for the general welfare than this? I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we’ll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky. "
― Garth Risk Hallberg , City on Fire
13 " I will go out again this very night with my rockets and fuses. I will blow them straight out of their comfortable beds. Blow the rooftops off their houses. Blow the black, wretched night to bits. I will not stop. For mad I may be, but I will never be convenient. "
― Jennifer Donnelly , Revolution
14 " In those days, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin de Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s : a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barriere d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give a gravedigger. ‘Never mind’, said he, “you can pay me the next time, ‘ and then, to his collegue : ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are a regular customers. "