Urban Quotes

The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments

Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen

An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it’s where even the rich use public transportation

Enrique Penalosa

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine;And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine

George Washington Sears

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time

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.

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.

It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract.

I.M. Pei

Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.

I.M. Pei

Let's do it right. This is for the ages.

I.M. Pei

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

I.M. Pei

It's a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.

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?

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

Moses threw the spent cigarette butt to the ground. It bounced once then lay still. A lazy wisp of smoke drifted towards the reaching shadows. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed flakes of grit from the seat of his jeans. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he moved away from the pipe and began to negotiate a route down the alley. A rivulet of cans, wrappers and remnants of kebabs dotted the ground like flotsam; the waste of nights past, discarded by the nameless, faceless masses marking their territories with futile gestures. Oh, sure, the trash was still emptied these days – there were still garbage men around, but it just delayed the inevitable, prolonging the agony of a tired and dying world.

All women should feel as Sex Subjects if they want and choose so without fear of repressions, condemnations and put down and without the need to pay them for that.Being freely a sexy and seductive woman is allowed only for few privileged professions: actresses, dancers, models, singers, prostitutes. They all do it for work. You can pay for them being sexy.If a sexy woman is openly adored by a man, the woman remains as a woman, she is not turning into a table, a cup or a bill of money. She is still the Subject who knows her power.

Mai Loog

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.

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.

Michael Montoure