City Quotes

He wanted to flee in shame, to the kitchenette, to the next room, to the fire escapes and rooftops and the places where the city ended.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.

~ Lauren Destefano

The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.

~ Markus Zusak

My mouth opened.It happened.Yes, with my head thrown into the sky, I started howling.Arms stretched out next to me, I howled, and everything came out of me. Visions pored up my throat and past voices surrounded me. The sky listened. The city didn't. I didn't care. All I cared about was that I was howling so that I could hear my voice and so I would remember that the boy had intensity and something to offer. I howled, oh, so loud and desperate, telling a world that I was here and I wouldn't lie down.

~ Markus Zusak

...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...

~ Jack Kerouac

We are relatives at the village and yet we become strangers in the city

~ Thabo Katlholo

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.

~ David Goodis

At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart.

~ Mark Helprin

We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.

~ Raymond Williams

All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night.

~ Ray Bradbury

You must be very proud, the whole city crowded with your lovers.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

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

Fill this city of mine with people as,You filled the river with fishes O Lord.

~ Quli Qutub Shah

She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open doorof the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.

~ Kristen Henderson

A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.

~ Stephanie Clifford

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!

~ Daniel Amory

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

Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....

~ Kristen Henderson

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

I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Be the best, not necessarily the original.

~ I.m. Pei

I walk the city, through its crush of people and its smells:body odour, rotting food, vomit and urine. A cocktail of oppression and freedom.

~ Emma Cameron

I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

~ Leon Krier

The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)

~ Sarah Turnbull

I came to this city to escape.

~ Jeanette Winterson

City people. They may know how to street fight but they don't know how to wade through manure.

~ Melina Marchetta

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

~ Kate Atkinson

In the city, strangers seldom meet beyond daily functions. Instead, they brush by with a haste and preoccupation that so defines a century of 'too little time'.

~ Joshua Krook

No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.

~ Jane Jacobs

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

~ Nelson Algren

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

~ Chief Seattle

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.

~ J.d. Salinger

I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, But my heart was full of my new love's glory, My eyes were laughing and unafraid.I met one who had loved me madly And told his love for all to hear -- But we talked of a thousand things together, The past was buried too deep to fear.I met the other, whose love was given With never a kiss and scarcely a word -Oh, it was then the terror took me Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die - but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years…I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, My heart was full of my new love's glory, - But my eyes were suddenly afraid.

~ Sara Teasdale

If there were such a thing as an inter-city thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone’s wallets.

~ Terry Pratchett

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.

~ Lewis Mumford

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

~ Don Delillo

To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.

~ Louis L'amour

We'll start to forget a place once we left it

~ Charles Dickens