Quotes by Authors - Page 33

A city full of art is a city full of wit!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For a city to be beautiful, it must have a mysterious air!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life’s moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here.
Michael Puttonen
He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.
John Vaillant
What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.“That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.”He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”“Reflections?” he asked quietly.“They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.
Jessica Hawkins
Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.
Neil Gaiman
New York had saved him, in a very real way. It had pushed and prodded him with its impatient and sharp fingers, reminding him on a daily basis during that jittery first year that it didn't really give a goddamn whether he sank or swam. He liked its selfishness and its generosity and its propensity for flipping the bird to the rest of the world.
Nora Roberts
In photographs taken from the sky, cities resembled circuit boards. It was no surprise, really, that there were sparky misfirings, dangerous connections. Even traffic, Alice concluded, set up a kind of static in the air, let loose vibrations and uncontainable agitation. Freighted with more than they could absorb, with city intentions, citizens moved in designs of inexplicable purpose.
Gail Jones
Who said Hong Kong too small? In size perhaps but not in it`s soul and personality. Every corner in this city giving you full of surprises, if not every hour but at least every day….
Baris Gencel
@K11, Urban farming; It’s something nice and warm for families and kids, but also references elements of the city. Urban Farming is very important for Shanghainese people because the city has lost its connection with nature. When you buy fruit or vegetables it’s just that - a product - for kids and us, we wanted to reconnect this with the amazing process of growing plants. People need this, urban farming connects people with their roots. In this way it’s also educational
Baris Gencel
There seems to be a different Chicago around every street corner, behind every bar, and within every apartment, two-flat, cottage, or bungalow. City of immigrants or city of heartless plutocrats, say what you will, Chicago almost defies interpretation. In many ways Chicago is like a snake that sheds its skin every thirty years or so and puts on a new coat to conform to a new reality.
Dominic A. Pacyga
I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.
Chaim Potok
So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from the lower Faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here and I am whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps. I was last night about to enter the Shaddowe of Rest when a Watch-man, half-drunken, thumps at the Door with his Past Three-a-clock and his Rainy Wet Morning. And when at length I slipp'd into Sleep I had no sooner forgot my present Distemper than I was plunged into a worse: I dreamd my self to be lying in a small place under ground, like unto a Grave, and my Body was all broken while others sung. And there was a Face that did so terrifie me that I had like to have expired in my Dream. Well, I will say no more.
Peter Ackroyd
Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.
Italo Calvino
Never follow the crowd....Until and unless you're crossing the road...
Sanhita Baruah
There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld c
Terry Pratchett
What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?
Rabih Alameddine
Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.
Patrick Modiano
This is what I’ve always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.
David Vann
For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.
Isa Kamari
Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days’ time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The rush of life causes people to drown in the temporary. He wishes to dip into eternity before he leaves.
Isa Kamari
We all tend to think of ourselves as the last unsinning inhabitants of whatever place we live in. We don't usually recognize ourselves as participants in its destruction.
David Owen
The silhouettes of Lovat now dominated the skyline. Nine levels stretching skyward. Five hundred meters high at its apex. Each level housing buildings of various sizes sagged on the backs of buildings below. Thousands of sodium lamps twinkled in their recesses.Lovat was the oldest and largest city on the coast, and it showed its age by the haphazard mess it had become. Roads rose and dipped, elevators and staircases criss-crossed, and floors would end and then begin across the city leaving large empty spaces between levels.
K.M. Alexander
And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.
Toni Morrison
It is perfectly banal to establish a city in the middle of nature but it is perfectly extraordinary to establish nature in the middle of a city! Ordinary nations do the first, extraordinary nations do the second!
Mehmet Murat ildan
...all this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us.
Nikolai Gogol
I think no matter where you go, you'll be happy as long as you know why you're there.
Rachel Kapelke-Dale
Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most poeple who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be - that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.
Elizabeth Gilbert
There are great roads, beautiful bridges, lovely parks, gorgeous gardens and wonderful buildings in a big city. But there is something missing, something very important: The spirit of nature!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We get so used to the gregarious nature of our towns and villages that we forget how crowded our existence has become.
Fennel Hudson
Although my father had never been there, I came to believe I would someday see that city for him.
Alice Hoffman
My visage high above your city,Shines like gold, but half as pretty.Arms I've none, but hands I've two:Mondo, mini, black not blue.Climb my stairs and have no fears, All that threatens are my gears.Tucked beneath the mightly wheel,An envelpe shall truth reveal.
Megan Frazer Blakemore
The best thing to be in a city was anonymous. Failing that, however, notoriety would do.
Michael Swanwick
All night, snow.Open the window,stretch my arms out.Keep my eyes openin the white, whipping wind.There are few cars on the highway.The river's frozen in places.In a city that never stops,I can hardly hear anything.For tonight, the city gives mewhat I need.
Cordelia Jensen
I will not see you, she tells the city, but I will remember you.
Robert Jackson Bennett
When I come back to you, if I come back to you, will I know you? Will you be the city of my memory? Or will you be a stranger?
Robert Jackson Bennett
If you don’t hear the crows of the roosters in the mornings, you are one cursed city fellow!
Mehmet Murat ildan
the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.
J.G. Ballard
Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.
J.G. Ballard
this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.
J.G. Ballard
Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.
Roald Dahl
My dear, you are not one person. You have many people in you, and each one can ask only some kinds of questions.
Bilal Tanweer
a city is all about how you look at it
Bilal Tanweer
I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.
Jesse Jackson
He needed to get away from the rush of the city, from the unceasing noise and annoying obligations.
Francine Rivers
for the first time I am confronted with the fact that places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.
Bilal Tanweer
Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, defecate.
Haruki Murakami
The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.
André Alexis
In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature - or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organism. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.
Haruki Murakamiurakami
She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.
Lydia Davis
There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you're pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads.
Steven Rowley
I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
Donna Tartt
The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat.
T.T. Monday
But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.
Amanda Craig
I could hear it from far away, that sound which only very big cities can produce: a sound consisting of all sounds rolled into one: the hum of voices and the cries of animals, bells ringing and the chink of coins, children's laughter and hammers beating metal, knives and forks clattering and a thousand doors slamming - the grandiose sound of life, of birth and death, itself.
Walter Moers
To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be destroyed
Cassandra Clare
Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question...
T.S Eliot
Well… er -”“Expecting a rescue is beyond hope under the circumstances!” Sam Barthoff, Mayor of Atro City, interrupted grimly, throwing up his hands in hopelessness. “Hopeless!
Christina Engela
She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.
Arundhati Roy
She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.
Arundhati Roy