City Quotes

What is the city but the people?

~ William Shakespeare

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach.

~ Albert Camus

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

~ Christopher Morley

The chicken is the country's but the city eats it.

~ George Herbert

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining but they make them artificial.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The city is a cultural invention enforcing on the citizen knowledge of his own nature. And this we do not like. That we are aggressive beings easily given to violence that we get along together because we must more than because we want to and that the brotherhood of man is about as far from reality today as it was two thousand years ago that reason's realm is small that we never have been and never shall be created equal that if the human being is perfectible he has so far exhibited few symptoms - all are considerations of man from which space tends to protect us.

~ Robert Ardrey

There is nothing good to be had in the country or if there be they will not let you have it.

~ William Hazlitt

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

~ Oscar Wilde

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

To say the least a town life makes one more tolerant and liberal in one's judgement of others.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness natives give it solidity and continuity but the settlers give it passion.

~ E. B. White

Summertime oh summertime pattern of life indelible the fade-proof lake the woods unshatterable the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever . . . the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp. This was the American family at play escaping the city heat.

~ E. B. White

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

~ Kathleen Norris

Here too, as in the Commune almost a century earlier, the struggle was articulated around the hope that 'the antithesis between the everyday and the Festival--whether of labour or of leisure--will no longer be a basis for society.

~ Tom Mcdonough

The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of objects of consumption, which will only have consumable value illusory to the extent to which they will first of all have been objects of spectacle' -- to the extent, that is, they have first appeared on the television screen, which henceforth had to be seen as an urbanistic tool in its own right.

~ Tom Mcdonough

One of my greatest obsessions is the lights of a city. Through my eyes there is nothing so delicious and rich and lovely.

~ K.b. Ezzell

As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.

~ Jardine Libaire

A bus drives past and I’m nauseated by a whiff of exhaust. Then rotting fish. The rancid stench of sewage. Is it garbage day? I’m trapped in the pungent fog, in the dreary suburban-style shops, the rat race of city life. The city, even on the west coast, has the power to beat us down, to suck us of passion, to crush our dreams.

~ Shannon Mullen

This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.

~ Amit Chaudhuri

She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.

~ Arundhati Roy

She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.

~ Arundhati Roy

Well… er -”“Expecting a rescue is beyond hope under the circumstances!” Sam Barthoff, Mayor of Atro City, interrupted grimly, throwing up his hands in hopelessness. “Hopeless!

~ Christina Engela

Where do you go if you don’t belong anywhere? If I wanted to run away then why come to the city? Because this is the place to hide. This is the place to be invisible. Anyone can be no one here, and I am someone that wants to be no one.

~ Steven Wilson

Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question...

~ T.s. Eliot

To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be destroyed

~ Cassandra Clare

I could hear it from far away, that sound which only very big cities can produce: a sound consisting of all sounds rolled into one: the hum of voices and the cries of animals, bells ringing and the chink of coins, children's laughter and hammers beating metal, knives and forks clattering and a thousand doors slamming - the grandiose sound of life, of birth and death, itself.

~ Walter Moers

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.

~ Amanda Craig

The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat.

~ T.t. Monday

I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

~ Donna Tartt

There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you're pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads.

~ Steven Rowley

She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.

~ Lydia Davis

In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature - or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organism. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

~ Haruki Murakamiurakami

The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.

~ André Alexis

Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, defecate.

~ Haruki Murakami

for the first time I am confronted with the fact that places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.

~ Bilal Tanweer

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

He needed to get away from the rush of the city, from the unceasing noise and annoying obligations.

~ Francine Rivers

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

~ Jesse Jackson

Things taste sweeter when you have some hunger left to linger. You feel it hunting your head for buried things, digging into the fractures of your breath warm and greedy.

~ Bilal Tanweer