Cities Quotes - Page 3

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.You have never spoken before.

China Miéville

It wasn’t Hell; only fools and drama queens throw that word around about a place like Gotham. It was worse, in a way, because it was manmade. There wasn’t any timeless malevolence behind it all, it was just… what human beings can descend to when they let themselves forget they can be heroes.

Chris Dee

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Italo Calvino

Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or life, with no fear of recourse or punishment.

Julie Wilson

…Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there…

Italo Calvino

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.

Mark Helprin

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now,and I'm not letting go.

Charlotte Eriksson

Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.

Charlie LeDuff

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Anna Quindlen

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure.

Don DeLillo

...Why are corporations so fleeting?...Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.

Jonah Lehrer

Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.

Richard Florida

You're an unemployed bum. Should you live in that Finnish city by the lake with the S-market and K-market? Or how about that other Finnish city by the lake with the S-market and K-market? Finnish cities are all so very different!

Phil Schwarzmann

You're already dead inside. Years of living in Espoo have made you an empty husk of a human being. They don't call their hockey team the "Espoo Blues" for nothing.

Phil Schwarzmann

There are many who say ‘I believe this,’ but would they hold true to those beliefs if their children were threatened? No. But Genghis would. If you told him you would kill his children, he would tell you to go ahead, but realize that the cost would be infinite, that he would tear down cities and nations and the price would never be paid. He did not lie and his enemies knew it. His word was iron.

Conn Iggulden

The city gives even to children a sophisticated look that baffles the casual psychologist.

Honoré Willsie Morrow

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.

Jane Jacobs

The world is a wide place where we stumble like children learning to walk. The world is a bright mosaic where we learn like children to see, where our little blurry eyes strive greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they can.The world is a coaxing whisper when the wind lips the trees, when the sea licks the shore, when animals burrow into earth and people look up at the sympathetic stars. The world is an admonishing roar when gales chase rainclouds over the plains and whip up ocean waves, when people crowd into cities or intrude into dazzling jungles.What right have we to carry our desperate mouths up mountains or into deserts? Do we want to taste rock and sand or do we expect to make impossible poems from space and silence? The vastness at least reminds us how tiny we are, and how much we don't yet understand. We are mere babes in the universe, all brothers and sisters in the nursery together. We had better learn to play nicely before we're allowed out..... And we want to go out, don't we? ..... Into the distant humming welcoming darkness.

Jay Woodman

God gave us ground we created a city, God gave us time we need to create a future.

Amit Kalantri

You have a responsibility to keep your homes, surroundings and city clean.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there. Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller. Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started there for a reason and then couldn't imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it. Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you came up with not much.

Choire Sicha

Laziness has made our cities unclean. If we begin to work and act appropriately, we will clean our cities of any dirt.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Detroit is big enough to matter in the world and small enough for you to matter in it.

Jeanette Pierce

I, sometimes, fear that probably I'll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I'll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do.

Sanhita Baruah

There is a world outside the one we know,” he said softly, “with cultures and races and armies who have never heard of us. Yes, and cities greater than Yenking and Karakorum. To survive, to grow, we must remain strong. We must conquer new lands, so that our army is always fed, always moving. To stop is to die, Chagatai.

Conn Iggulden

As a sea level adapted human, I am more fearful about the radiation levels on top of high altitude mountains, mile high modern cities and inside jet aircraft than from nuclear reactors and bombs, as that is where I get the most radiation exposures in the modern world.

Steven Magee

The top easily preventable health problems that I see in western societies are: 1. Eating chemically grown food. 2. Exposure to electronically generated harmonic energy from wind and solar power systems. 3. Exposure to harmonic energy from switched mode power supplies (SMPS) that come with modern electronic products. 4. Exposure to wireless radio frequency radiation (RF). 5. Light deficiency from an indoor lifestyle and Low-E double glazed windows. 6. Sound deficiency from heavily insulated homes that are devoid of natural sounds and are extremely quiet. 7. Pollen deficiency from living in man-made cities that are devoid of natural levels of pollen. 8. Natural radiation deficiency from living in homes that block natural levels of environmental radiation. 9. Open drain sickness that occurs when drain traps dry out and faulty vent valves that allow sewer gas to fill the home. 10. Drinking the wrong type of water.

Steven Magee

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies.

Jane Jacobs

There's organized confusion on African roads while driving in the cities. If you want to mess up Afican Cities very easy, just fly in 100 Americans put them on the road and tell them to drive.

Jidenna

Desire to dwell in clean environment.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else.""Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.

Anthony Ryan

Now that I have definitely begun to live I find myself more and more convinced that civilization with its trappings and artificialities is not so good as nature.

H.S. Ede

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..

Amanda Craig

Having spent a long time in open spaces, whether sea or desert, it is a luxury to be able to take refuge in towns with narrow streets which provide a fragile fortress against the assaults of the infinite. There is such a sense of security against the boundless there, even if the murmur of the wave or the silence of the sands still pursue one through tortuous corridors. The winds, despite their subtle spirits, are themselves lost in the vestibules of this labyrinth and, unable to find a way through, whistle and turn in turbulence like demented dervishes. They will not break through the walls of this den in which life still pulsates in the shadows of humanity's black sun.

Georges Limbour

We have grace of strength to work, to clear our cities of any dirt.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Libraries, museums, universities, everything we designed and built over six thousand years. Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

Rick Yancey

The modern human has mastered the art of building toxic homes and cities.

Steven Magee

To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.

Jane Jacobs

I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.

Heather Demetrios

I have rooted myself into this quiet place where I don’t need much to get by. I need my visions. I need my books. I need new thoughts and lessons, from older souls, bars, whisky, libraries; different ones in different towns. I need my music. I need my songs. I need the safety of somewhere to rest my head at night, when my eyes get heavy. And I need space. Lots of space. To run, and sing, and change around in any way I please—outer or inner—and I need to love. I need the space to love ideas and thoughts; creations and people—anywhere I can find—and I need the peace of mind to understand it.

Charlotte Eriksson

There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry, jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earth-quakes. But it’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.

Elmore Leonard

For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.

Conn Iggulden

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

Neil Gaiman

Paris has history, it has art, it has wonderful architecture, it has literature, but much more important than all these, it has freedom! If a city cannot offer freedom to its dwellers, all its other beauties will be meaningless!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Cities get built out of poet's dreams.

Marty Rubin

A soulless city creates soulless people!

Mehmet Murat ildan

I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful place if it were not for the people, and how more than true it was that people were not worth troubling about, and that wise men should set their affections upon nothing smaller than cities, heavenly or otherwise, and countrysides which are always heavenly.

Katherine Mansfield

A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again.

Rasmenia Massoud

...Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino

It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself— loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.

Nelson Algren

(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements--abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out...In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost.

Nick Flynn

To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the darkness Or an umbrella in a stormy day; To feel much more than know. To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves; To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching. To be a smile on the face of a woman And shine in her memory As a moment saved without planning.

Dejan Stojanovic

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

Neal Shusterman

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.

Herman Wouk

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colours. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.

Don DeLillo

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

Charles Baudelaire

There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.

Charlotte Eriksson

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.

Roman Payne

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Cities Quotes - Page 3

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