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

Choire Sicha Cities City Life Drugs Goals Life Love Metropolis Metropolises Plans Sex Urban Fabric Urban Life Work

With an evermore increase of industrialisation machine stops being merely a tool, develops a life of its own and imposes its rhythm onto human. Operating it he moves mechanically, becomes part of the machine.

~ Heide Schönemann

Heide Schönemann Autonomy Capitalism Cyberpunk Economy Fritz Lang Human Humanity Humans Industrialisation Machine Machine Autonomy Machines Marxism Metropolis Modernity Neuromancer Society System System Autonomy

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

Anna Quindlen Cities Fictional London Imagination Life Literary London Literature London Metropolis

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

Khushwant Singh Bombay Cities City Life India Indian Authors Khushwant Singh Metropolis Mumbai

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

Kristen Henderson 911 City Dusk Metropolis New Jersey New York City Plum Pointilist Sundown Twilight Twin Towers

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

Amanda Craig Britain Capital City Dirty England London Metropolis Uk