City Quotes - Page 4

I came to this city to escape.
Jeanette Winterson
The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)
Sarah Turnbull
A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.
Leon Krier
I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody
John Lanchesterter
I walk the city, through its crush of people and its smells:body odour, rotting food, vomit and urine. A cocktail of oppression and freedom.
Emma Cameron
Be the best, not necessarily the original.
I.M. Pei
I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.
James Baldwin
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.
Thomas Wolfe
Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....
Kristen Henderson
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Teju Cole
Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.
Stephanie Clifford
It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!
Daniel Amory
A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.
Rudyard Kipling
She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open doorof the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.
Kristen Henderson
Fill this city of mine with people as,You filled the river with fishes O Lord.
Quli Qutub Shah
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
All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night.
Ray Bradbury
We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.
Raymond Williams
At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart.
Mark Helprin
Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.
David Goodis
We are relatives at the village and yet we become strangers in the city
Thabo Katlholo
...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...
Jack Kerouac
The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.
Markus Zusak
My mouth opened.It happened.Yes, with my head thrown into the sky, I started howling.Arms stretched out next to me, I howled, and everything came out of me. Visions pored up my throat and past voices surrounded me. The sky listened. The city didn't. I didn't care. All I cared about was that I was howling so that I could hear my voice and so I would remember that the boy had intensity and something to offer. I howled, oh, so loud and desperate, telling a world that I was here and I wouldn't lie down.
Markus Zusak
This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.
Lauren DeStefano
He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places where the city ended.
Garth Risk Hallberg
Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.
Sara Sheridan
The city of San Francisco engulfed their view through the front windshield. The dazzling light of the late morning sun transformed every glass and metal surface into a silvery mirage.
Victoria Kahler
they'd become unaccustomed to the brightness of their own city, and, faced with it now in all its intensity, they cupped their hands over their eyes as if staring into the sun.
Jennifer E. Smith
In his mind, the city, as it awoke from its slumber, seemed to be built on quicksand. The stability was illusory.
Liu Cixin
Valerie, I love you so much. I wanted you to have a normalchildhood—so I lived a double life. Hiding in plainsight. Living modestly.” He began to pace the room, thewords tumbling out of him. “I tried to keep it up, but I’vebeen so disrespected. Even by my own wife. I couldn’t do itanymore. I’ve settled for far less than I deserved, and I justcouldn’t do it anymore. I decided it was time to leave forthe city....For richer hunting grounds.” Cesaire was snarlingnow, a scary, powerful force. Valerie felt herself beingdrawn to it....She took a deep, steadying breath. It was not just fearthat she felt. What she felt was so much more complexthan that, something she couldn’t understand. “Then whydidn’t you just go?”“Because I loved you girls, and I wanted you to comewith me. To share the wealth.”“But you had to wait until the blood moon.
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
Laughing like crazythe child goes back to the citygives birth to monsterscreates earthquakeshairy women run nakedold folks who look like fetuses laugh and smoke.
Nicanor Parra
They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles.
Christopher Bollen
A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.
Epictetus
If you aren’t paranoid before you arrive in this city, give it a few weeks and you will soon notice it creeping in, dripping into your subconscious like a leaky tap. The trick is not to give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about you, and if you are in the right frame of mind this can be an easy trick to perform but if not you’ll soon notice that for a city full of people who do a great Stevie Wonder impersonation when it comes to the homeless and beggars and casual violence towards others, wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a cheap suit brings out a sneering, hateful attitude that can have weaker minded individuals locked in their houses for weeks before harassing their doctors for prescriptions of Prozac and Beta blockers just to make it out the front door.
Garry Crystal
The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.
Hanif Kureishi
The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack you shot up in Sutherland's apartment, no, it wasn't any of these. It was the city, darling, it was the city, the city itself. And do you see why I had to leave? As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself.
Andrew Holleran
I remember when I was twenty-five,� he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.
Daniel Amory
A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.
Roman Payne
I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.
Steven Magee
Cairo is in a state of becoming… We just don't know what it's becoming yet.
Daniel Joseph Monti
Even through the smoke,you are still the most beautiful thingin this city and I, well, I am stillthe last thing you’d save in a fire.
Danabelle Gutierrez
When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”What will you answer? “We all dwell togetherTo make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
T.S Eliot
By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.
Socrates
It is always easy to create an ordinary city; what is difficult is to create an extraordinary one, peaceful and restful one, smart and tidy, artful and cultivated one, in short, a livable one! And Zurich is such a city!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There are some cities in the world, they would have looked much more beautiful had they never been a city and İstanbul is such a city!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Stop worrying about missed opportunities and start looking for new ones.
I.M. Pei
They were the most romantic creatures in the city in that room. If their days were spent in banks and office buildings, no matter: Their true lives began when they walked through this door—and were baptized into a deeper faith, as if brought to life by miraculous immersion. They lived only for the night.
Andrew Holleran
She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that’s broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.
Jardine Libaire
He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.
Henry James
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
Albert Camus
When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.
Jane Jacobs
Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night. The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge.
Daniel Amory
Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.
Sol Luckman
The wind picked up, shaking the trees below. She had the sense of being in the country. In the country, if a woman could not face her children, or her friends, or her family – if she were covered in shame – she would probably only need to lay herself down in a field and take her leave by merging, first with the grass underneath her, then with the mulch under that. A city child, Natalie Blake had always been naive about country matters. Still, when it came to the city, she was not mistaken. Here nothing less than a break – a sudden and total rupture – would do.
Zadie Smith
Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.
Emma Jane Unsworth
At the beginning, I thought the best Islamic work was in Spain - the mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada. But as I learned more, my ideas shifted. I traveled to Egypt, and to the Middle East many times.I found the most wonderful examples of Islamic work in Cairo, it turns out. I'd visited mosques there before, but I didn't see them with the same eye as I did this time. They truly said something to me about Islamic architecture.
I.M. Pei
Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.
Leslie T. Chang

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