City Quotes - Page 3

To say the least a town life makes one more tolerant and liberal in one's judgement of others.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness natives give it solidity and continuity but the settlers give it passion.

E B White

I like to visit New York but I wouldn't live there if you gave it to me.

American Saying

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson called New York.

o.henry

Vulgar of manner overfed. Overdressed and underbred Heartless Godless hell's delight Rude by day and lewd by night Bedwarfed the man o'ergrown the brute Ruled by boss and prostitute Purple-robed and pauper-clad Raving rotting money-mad A squirming herd in Mammon's mesh A wilderness of human flesh Crazed with avarice lust and rum New York thy name's Delirium.

Byron R. Newton

I like to visit New York but I wouldn't live there if you gave it to me.

American Saying

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson called New York.

o.henry

Byron R. Newton

This poor little one-horse town.

S. L. Clemens

If you would know and not be known live in a city.

Walter Colton

God made the country and man made the town.

William Cowper

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining but they make them artificial.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the busy haunts of men.

Felicia D. Hemans

Far from gay cities and the way of men.

Homer

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.

Matthew

The people are the city.

William Shakespeare

Installing massive amounts of wireless devices into every city may eventually be proven to be a global weather modification system.

Steven Magee

Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?

Tom McDonough

We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual -- ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world -- is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love -- passion -- liberty.Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

Tom McDonough

A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,–the city is a garment stretched so thinher festive colors bleed into the night.

Michael Burch

Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that has withdrawn the element of time from journeying, has also withdrawn the reality of space.

Tom McDonough

Moreover the present abundance3 of private cars is nothing other than the result of the non-stop propaganda through which capitalist production persuades the mob--and in this case is one of its most confounding successes--that the possession of a car is specifically one of the privileges our society reserves for its privileged members.

Tom McDonough

So many problems we will get to the bottom of later, but whose spatial aspect we must grasp right away. If the space of the industrial economy dominates the social space in which the Parisian worker or intellectual develops, to what extent could residential space, cultural space, or political space be planned without it being necessary to first intervene in economic structures?...In short...: to what extent can we freely build the framework for a social life in which we might be guided by our aspirations and not by our instincts?

Tom McDonough

Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of utility and necessity that, according to their beliefs, should be the basis for the construction of any object created by humanity become immediately absurd once we analyze all the object being manufactured today. A fork or a bed cannot come to be considered necessary for humanity's life and health, and yet retain a relative value.They are 'learned necessities.' Modern human beings are suffocating under necessities like televisions, refrigerators, etc. And in the process making it impossible to live their real lives. Obviously we are not against modern technology, but we are against any notion of the absolute necessity of objects, to the point even of doubting their real utility.'Asger Jorn

Tom McDonough

It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night he had made of it.

Henry James

The city's all brightnessand shadow, deckle-edged, bluer than air-there's no help anywhere-you no longer know how to listen.

Ralph Angel

...the assessment of psychological drift, that is the way in which an undirected pedestrian tends to move about in a particular quarter of the town, tending to establish natural connections between places, the zones of influence of particular institutions and public services, and so forth. It may well be objected that these techniques are un-scientific, disorderly and too subjective, but the fact remains that the Situationists are studying the actual texture of towns and their relationship to human beings more intensively than most architects and in a more down-to-pavement manner than most town planners.

Tom McDonough

8. Conditions of DialogueThe functional is what is practical. The only practical thing is the resolution of our fundamental problem: the realization of ourselves (our uncoupling from the system of isolation). This is useful and utilitarian. Nothing else. All the rest represents only trivial derivations of the practical, and its mystification.

Tom McDonough

We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a new topography will be in fact the first realization of 'human geography.' On them we will replace oil-deposits with the contours of layers of untapped pedestrian consciousness.

Tom McDonough

To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.

Louis L'Amour

We'll start to forget a place once we left it

Charles Dickens

It is strange being in a crowd where no one knows your face or cares for your purpose. In Lykos, I would have been jostled by men I'd grown up with, run across girls I'd chased and wrestled with as a child. Here, other Colors slam into me and offer not even a faint apology. This is a city, and I do not like it. I feel alone.

Pierce Brown

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

Neil Gaiman

This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.

Alexander McCall Smith

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

Charles Baudelaire

The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul's, he tripped and fell over a piece of rubble -- a tombstone. When he got to his feet and dusted himself down he saw that it read, in Latin, 'Resurgam' -- 'I Will Rise Again.

Jonathan Barnes

The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

Michel de Certeau

The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all...There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything.

Michel de Certeau

what does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.

Michel de Certeau

It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.

Michel de Certeau

Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be represented.

Saul Bellow

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Kate Christensen

When you looked out my window you could see the whole city crouched under a blanket of car smog.

Markus Zusak

To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...

Jane Jacobs

The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.

Tom McDonough

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

Jane Jacobs

We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.)

Tom McDonough

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

Ross Macdonald

The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?

Leigh Brackett

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

Nelson Algren

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

Chief Seattle

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.

J.D. Salinger

I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, But my heart was full of my new love's glory, My eyes were laughing and unafraid.I met one who had loved me madly And told his love for all to hear -- But we talked of a thousand things together, The past was buried too deep to fear.I met the other, whose love was given With never a kiss and scarcely a word -Oh, it was then the terror took me Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die - but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years…I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, My heart was full of my new love's glory, - But my eyes were suddenly afraid.

Sara Teasdale

If there were such a thing as an inter-city thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone’s wallets.

Terry Pratchett

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.

Lewis Mumford

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

Don DeLillo

No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.

Jane Jacobs

In the city, strangers seldom meet beyond daily functions. Instead, they brush by with a haste and preoccupation that so defines a century of 'too little time'.

Joshua Krook

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

Kate Atkinson

City people. They may know how to street fight but they don't know how to wade through manure.

Melina Marchetta

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City Quotes - Page 3

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