City Quotes

People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it's a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age. It's populated with both adults and children, it's a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me either way!

~ Anna Kendrick

When you're in the city, trapped among the cubic structures, it's easy to forget that you're connected to the earth, because you're so separated from it by layers and layers of protection - the soles of your shoes, sandals, or slippers, sheets of asphalt, concrete, linoleum tiling.

~ Vicente García Groyon

On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.

~ Évariste Régis Huc

Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.

~ Jeannette Walls

On the street below, the weather is calm. But up here, high winds threaten to topple the workers. A sudden gust can knock them from their footing with its sheer force or send a fatal vibration through the beams on which they stand. And yet the men joke, laugh, stroll across the foot-wide beams as though they are on solid ground. To the people on the sidewalk, tiny as ants below, the skywalkers appear entirely unafraid. A hundred years ago, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers built the skyscrapers and bridges that surround them.

~ David Weitzman

You can see the people who thought they could come to London, bend over and pick gold off the streets. They’re all lying on benches in Trafalgar Square with hernias and cans of Special Brew.

~ Garry Crystal

The city was dark except for the building lights that seemed to appear like sores - like bandaids had been ripped off to expose the city's skin.

~ Markus Zusak

Your ideas about possession must increase until you get to a state of full possession of the land, city and nation

~ Sunday Adelaja

Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity.

~ Tom Mcdonough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Jane Jacobs

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

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

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

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

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

~ I.m. Pei

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

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

~ Socrates

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

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

Cairo is in a state of becoming… We just don't know what it's becoming yet.

~ Daniel Joseph Monti

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

A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.

~ Roman Payne

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

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

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

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

A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.

~ Epictetus

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

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

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

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

~ Liu Cixin

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

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

Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.

~ Sara Sheridan