Cities Quotes

... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...

Jean-Christophe Valtat

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

...Americans didn’t stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years—so typical a place that it only looks like an exception.

Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")

Pierre Albert-Birot

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd, driving a tinkling flock along the walls."Man blessed by heaven," he asked me, stopping, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?""May the gods accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognise the illustrious city of Cecilia?""Bear with me," that man answered. "I am a wandering herdsman. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through cities; but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow between the Cliffs, the Green Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.""I am the opposite of you," I said. "I recognise only cities and cannot distinguish what is outside them. In uninhabited places each stone and each clump of grass mingles, in my eyes, with every stone and clump.

How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?

Charles de Gaulle

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

My father never lived to see his dream come true of an all-Yiddish-speaking Canada.

David Steinberg

London: A place you go to get bronchitis.

Take a perfect day add six hours of rain and fog and you have instant London.

Anonymous

Always remember that you are an Englishman and therefore have drawn first prize in the lottery of life.

I once saw a pin on a Delta Airlines employee and I asked him what the letters in Delta stand for. He said "Don't Expect Luggage To Arrive."

When I first came to this country I didn't have a nickel in my pocket - now I have a nickel in my pocket.

Thank God we're living in a country where the sky's the limit the stores are open late and thanks to television you can shop in bed.

I love the polite drivers in La Jolla. At an intersection . . . most expensive car goes first.

Kee Flynn

There is nothing safer than flying - it's crashing that is dangerous.

I would love to speak a foreign language but I can't. So I grew hair under my arms instead.

Chicago was started by a bunch of New Yorkers who said "Gee I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty but it just isn't cold enough."

After years of mocking L.A. for its smog the people of Denver are now coughing out of the other side of their mouths.

Anonymous

There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

It looks as if Hollywood brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.

L.A. bumper sticker: Keep honking - I'm reloading.

Anonymous

Miami drivers will attempt to pass you inside a car wash.

I have no respect for gangs today. None. They just drive by and shoot people. At least in the old days like in West Side Story the gangs used to dance with each other.

A car is useless in New York essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

Mignon McLaughlin

I feel about New York as a child whose father is a bank robber. Not perfect but I still love him.

New Yorkers are so impersonal if it wasn't for muggings there wouldn't be any contact at all!

Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired you've had a headache since you arrived but you can't leave because then you'd miss the party.

Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spend in New York.

I have just returned from Boston it is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there.

A small town is usually divided by a railroad a main street two churches and a lot of opinions.

Anonymous

texan starting eternity: I never dreamed heaven would be so much like Texas. companion: Who said this was heaven?

Anonymous

I would say that the single most important conclusion I reached after traveling through Japan as well as countless hours reading studying and analyzing this fascinating culture is that you should always tighten the cap on the shampoo bottle before you put it in your suitcase.

I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong and he said: "Yes: the little one does."

A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.

When we can't get away for a vacation we get the same feeling by staying home and tipping every person that smiles.

One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country the American dollar will fall like a stone.

The trouble with all these other countries is they're all being run by foreigners.

Anonymous

This summer one-third of the nation will be ill-housed ill-nourished and ill-clad. Only they call it a vacation.

My wife tells me she doesn't care what I do when I'm away as long as I'm not enjoying it.

On cable TV they have a weather channel - twenty-four hours of weather. We had something like that where I grew up. We called it a window.

There's a lot of nice things about Denver. I just don't for the life of me know what they are.

The people of Seattle deny they get much rain while the rest of the country thinks of it as America's bladder.

Anonymous

Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.

The tanned appearance of many New Englanders is not sunburn - it is rust.

Anonymous

I hate Billings Montana. They have a fashion show at Sears Roebuck - no models. You open a catalog and point.

L.A.'s large convenience stores are so big they can accommodate up to twenty armed robbers at one time.

Jay Leno

Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

Charles Baudelaire

Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.

I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.

Khushwant Singh

Oh you dear companionsElectric bells of the stations song of the reapersButcher's sleigh regiment of unnumbered streetsCavalry of bridges nights livid with alcoholThe cities I've seen lived like mad women(The Voyager)

Pierre Albert-Birot

Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass.

1 2 3 Next