Cities Quotes

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

If we act in clean way, we shall clear the city of any dirt.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

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

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.

~ Khushwant Singh

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

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

~ David Levien

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

~ Bruce Crown

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

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.

~ Jane Jacobs

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

~ Jane Jacobs

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

~ Chief Seattle

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

It looks as if Hollywood brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.

~ Groucho Marx

It is possible to live in San Francisco for $35 000 a year. Obviously that doesn't include food or lodging.

~ Kenn Carlson

L.A. bumper sticker: Keep honking - I'm reloading.

~ Anonymous

Miami bumper sticker: My horn is broken-so watch for my finger.

~ Anonymous

Miami drivers will attempt to pass you inside a car wash.

~ Dave Barry

I lived in Miami for a while in a section with a lot of really old people. The average age in my apartment house was dead.

~ Gabe Kaplan

I have no respect for gangs today. None. They just drive by and shoot people. At least in the old days like in West Side Story the gangs used to dance with each other.

~ Robert G. Lee

A car is useless in New York essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

~ Mignon Mclaughlin