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

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

Michael Montoure

All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew "cottons with big full skirts and university personalities" would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to be hard and urban.

Elizabeth Winder

She stared at the bullwhip coiled Indiana Jones-style at his narrow waist, then at the black-handled dagger sheathed on his right hip. An obsidian rapier--Fae-forged and unbreakable--almost merged with one of the taped seams that ran down the sides of his pants. He even wore a dagger gunslinger-style at his hip. Dear Goddess, the man was a walking arsenal, but he was sexy as hell.

Kryssie Fortune

Tony's concern disintegrated. He could not understand C.J.'s determination to court death on a daily basis. Or maybe he did understand, and this was what caused his frustration. So many found the same solution his brother had. Selling death to their own people. The money was a difficult lure to resist. Additionally, the fear elicited from their hard core posturing proved nearly as addictive. They demanded to be heard, even though it didn't seem they had much to say. Perhaps the futility and smallness that characterized their lives was too overwhelming to articulate in any manner other than a primitive, incoherent scream. Maybe it was inevitable that those who felt they had no stake in society would opt to destroy it.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

Jeanette Winterson

I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.” …Anias Nin

Angelic Artiaga

Stop worrying about missed opportunities and start looking for new ones.

I.M. Pei

She's got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.

Jennifer Donnelly

Beautiful people don't need coats. They've got their auras to keep them warm.

Jennifer Donnelly

Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

Charles E. Rosenberg

A Memory Is Better Than A Phony!

When I was three years old and in my mother's arms, she looked down at me and said, "Son, the way I'm taking care of you now, when you get old, always have a woman to take care of you like this." Dig this! All I'm goin' do is rest and dress, buy gasoline and lean. I'm goin' buy diamond rings and have the best of everything. I'm goin' pimp whores.

She smells of her cooking and the perfume Eau d'Hadrien. My mother wore it, too. She used to cook, like Lili. Our house smelled of garlic and thyme instead of sadness.

Jennifer Donnelly

A grey-suited figure with badly-scuffed shoes was squatted over a woman’s body, obscuring her face and upper torso. A loose, white dress; torn, now mostly red. A pattern of rose petals, drenched in blood. One of her sandals was missing, scarlet streaks and spatters on her jade-green polished toenails and pale, slender ankles.tAnother step took him around the hunched and twitching figure. It ignored him, intent on its work. Then its victim came fully into view … and he saw her ruined face.

Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.

You can't understand a city without using its public transportation system.

Erol Ozan

What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores!?

It was common knowledge that big, bad city boys spent the bulk of their time sleeping around, coiffing their hair and posting pictures of food on the internet.

What did the mat say to the door? You must be really aDOORable to open up to everyone who knock at you. And I welcome everyone and what do I get? People stepping all over me

Ana Claudia Antunes

Architecture is the very mirror of life. You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

I.M. Pei

C.J. had once believed that he understood who he was, what he was about, what he was capable of. But when the moment came to act upon these convictions, he discovered that his knowledge of self was faulty. Had his lack of killer instinct been a momentary lapse, first time jitters? Or was there more to it than that? If not the fearless, remorseless man he supposed himself to be, then just who was he?

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Dream It, Believe In It, And Achieve It.

A civilization must be judged by its standards not by its expenditure.

The world grows ever complex. More urban. Less peaceful.

What the famous big blue Boy Scout told to a green Kryptonite? What?? YOU rock!

Ana Claudia Antunes

Staying relaxed was helping him cope with the drug induced juddering vision that could be best described as being like a Hitchcockian visual effect operated by a hyperactive squirrel that shook the whole universe closer and farther away. If you went with it, it was quite pleasant, as long as you didn't introduce any lateral movement like turning your head or the car. This caused the universe to try and slide away from underneath you. The other side effect was the constant feeling you ought to try to twist your head off, in a good way.

I can’t believe it.’ I whispered.‘You can’t let him lure you back in, Felicia. He’s wrong. He’s wrong!’ Vanian pleaded, I could feel the quiver of his magic, the wisps that were fighting against the iron burning into his wrists, I could feel the crackle as it fought in the air, against his emotions, against his pain. I shook my head, was about to speak but Adam grabbed him by the front of his shirt; as if a few more tears and shreds couldn’t go amiss. The tightness of his grip paled the Faerie’s cheeks, caused the blood to trickle down faster, dropping to the floor.‘My wife.’ He yelled, ‘She’s my wife, silverblood.’ With each growl of a syllable he accented it with a punch to Vanian’s face.I couldn’t take much more. I jumped over and pulled at Adam’s shoulders, fingertips driving into the nook of his collarbone, pressing down with as much as I had in me, anything to break his hold. He recoiled and rose his hand to me, at first I flinched but I stopped. He wouldn’t hurt me. He wouldn’t.

Charlotte Munro

... Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.

How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present

Attitude Is More Important Than Talent!

Attitude Is More Important Than Talent

Don't Rush Up The Stairs, you Just Might Fall. Take it One Step At A Time!

You Can't Replace A Star with A Lightbulb

You Can't Change Your Life... Until You Change Your Heart, and You Can't Change Your Heart... Until You Change Your Mind!

It's Easy To Feel Like A Big Fish, When Your Pond is Just A Puddle!

You Can't Be A Hero To The World, If Your Aren't First A Hero In Your Home!

You Don't Have To Be A Crook To Be Successful!

To Me, The Best Part Of Success, Is The Journey!

Never Let The Roosters Wake You!

My Friends I Will Always Remember, And My Enemies I Will Never Forget!

My Name Is Latif Mercado, And I Am... A Workaholic!

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