100 Quotes About City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desire to dwell in clean environment. Lailah Gifty Akita

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready. Tracey Emin

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

I'm the girl who's desperate to get out of her small town because if she doesn't she knows she'll die. She knows her soul will start to rot, like fruit gone bad. Heather Demetrios

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

Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?' And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have. Italo Calvino

A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place–a set of perceptions of place. On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds. The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons. They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city. Ian McDonald

There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight. Kate Milford

...cities are murky places - hatching grounds for monsters... John Geddes

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

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. Unknown

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running. Edward Albee

Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable. H.W. Brands

But there, war does not care for predetermination; it also destroys in fury that wich is immaterial, the hopes and expectations (from Requiem for a Hotel /Nekrolog auf ein Hotel, 1918) Stefan Zweig

You can't love a city if you have no memories burried there. Marina Tavares Dias

The grandeur of the thieving falsity is larceny, the fall of cities. Unknown

There are no doubts that western governments are willfully inducing radiation sickness into segments of their city populations. Steven Magee

Of course, no government official will ever tell you that the cities may be making the people in them ill. Steven Magee

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you've lived in one all your life. Kate Milford

Lying flat on my back, with my toes dipped into the lake, I stared at the stars for a second. I guess I should have pondered their beauty and realized the rarity of a sky unsaturated by city lights, or something. But it occurred to me that you could probably see stars from the vast majority of the earth. It was city lights that were actually rare. Emily Adrian

Let the romantic minds meet the romantic cities and after that the candle of romanticism shines on earth like a sun! Mehmet Murat Ildan

All around us, Karachi kept moving Kamila Shamsie

For when man is faced with a curse he answers, "I'll take care of my problems." And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse. Jacques Ellul

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse. Clay Shirky

Some places will, however, be left behind. Not every city will succeed, because not every city has been adept at adapting to the age of information, in which ideas are the ultimate creator of wealth. Edward Glaeser

Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams. Frans De Waal

It all fell away then — the control, the independence .. . everything. She had known it would never be easy to findsolitude .. . to find herself. Not in this city, where appearances were everything; where emptiness filled luxurious landscapes till there was nothing but hollow splendor… She hated the pretense. More than hatred, she was frightened of it. Umair Naeem

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away. Jane Jacobs

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things. Terry Pratchett

Mind you, Thunder Bay has a lot of outskirts. It's actually two cities melded together, so in a sense it has twice as many outskirts as other places. It's understandable that we got lost.... Paul Quarrington

There are some cities in the world, they would have looked much more beautiful had they never been a city and Ä°stanbul is such a city! Mehmet Murat Ildan

There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that technology, which was supposed to cut the ties between people and places and allow people everywhere to work from almost anywhere, turns out to flourish in fairly compact geographic locations. Bruce Katz

It’s hopeless, trying to recruit a stranger to help me find someone who’s a stranger to him. But then again, we are all strangers to ourselves, caught up in the monotony of daily life, stuck in our routines, never really stopping to think about what will happen to us if we fall off track. Shannon Mullen

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities. Socrates

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying. Robert Ludlum

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city will someday make. Tod Wodicka

The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographicalcan be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l’ Arbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?. Guy Debord

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

And except on a certain kind of winter evening–six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that–except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. Joan Didion

We no longer produce laborers, we would rather pray to God to send laborers to come and build our cities Sunday Adelaja

Different cities visit us daily, they exist in the clouds. Antonia Perdu

In his mind, the city, as it awoke from its slumber, seemed to be built on quicksand. The stability was illusory. Liu Cixin

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love. Rebecca Solnit

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population of a city or country will just happen to look in the mirror at the same time, and from then on there was a city in the sky, as all cities are if we consider that the sky reaches to the ground, and this city, too, thought it was alive, and the candles walked off by themselves. Cole Swensen

She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again. William Gibson

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there. Ernest Hemingway

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side. Victor Hugo

... civilization–a word that simply means "living in cities..." Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses. Tom Standage

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her! ' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone. William Gibson

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood. Jack Kerouac

Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass. George Selden

I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it. Truman Capote

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world. Susan Ertz

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

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

Ant swarming CityCity full of dreams Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve Charles Baudelaire

A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car. Emile Ganest

When we can't get away for a vacation we get the same feeling by staying home and tipping every person that smiles. Susie Spanos

One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country the American dollar will fall like a stone. Erma Bombeck

The trouble with all these other countries is they're all being run by foreigners. Anonymous

My wife loves Europe but to me it's a bad day at a theme park. Jay Leno

This summer one-third of the nation will be ill-housed ill-nourished and ill-clad. Only they call it a vacation. Joseph Salak

My wife tells me she doesn't care what I do when I'm away as long as I'm not enjoying it. Lee Trevino

On cable TV they have a weather channel - twenty-four hours of weather. We had something like that where I grew up. We called it a window. Dan Spencer

There's a lot of nice things about Denver. I just don't for the life of me know what they are. Judy Hampton

The people of Seattle deny they get much rain while the rest of the country thinks of it as America's bladder. Anonymous

Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death. Mark Twain

The tanned appearance of many New Englanders is not sunburn - it is rust. Anonymous

I hate Billings Montana. They have a fashion show at Sears Roebuck - no models. You open a catalog and point. Joan Rivers

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars. Fred Allen

L.A.'s large convenience stores are so big they can accommodate up to twenty armed robbers at one time. Jay Leno

After years of mocking L.A. for its smog the people of Denver are now coughing out of the other side of their mouths. Anonymous

There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure. Ross Macdonald