Urban Quotes

Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.

~ Robert Dunbar

A grey-suited figure with badly-scuffed shoes was squatted over a woman’s body, obscuring her face and upper torso. A loose, white dress; torn, now mostly red. A pattern of rose petals, drenched in blood. One of her sandals was missing, scarlet streaks and spatters on her jade-green polished toenails and pale, slender ankles. Another step took him around the hunched and twitching figure. It ignored him, intent on its work. Then its victim came fully into view … and he saw her ruined face.

~ Scott Kaelen

She smells of her cooking and the perfume Eau d'Hadrien. My mother wore it, too. She used to cook, like Lili. Our house smelled of garlic and thyme instead of sadness.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

Chamari: Aravinda, have you been to Kataragama?Aravinda: No, I've never been there.Chamari: What? That's unbelievable for someone born in Deniyaya!Aravinda: Going to Kataragama is not a custom of the rural folk. It is the middle class and wealthy urban people, not the villagers, who venerate the Kataragama god. He is the god of the urbanities. The villagers have now started to imitate the urban people.Chamari:I thought even villagers used to go to Kataragama long ago.Aravinda: No, It came from the rich urban Sinhalese of the towns who followed the rich Hindus.

~ මාර්ටින් වික්‍රමසිංහ

When I was three years old and in my mother's arms, she looked down at me and said, Son, the way I'm taking care of you now, when you get old, always have a woman to take care of you like this. Dig this! All I'm goin' do is rest and dress, buy gasoline and lean. I'm goin' buy diamond rings and have the best of everything. I'm goin' pimp whores.

~ Donald Goines

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

~ Charles E. Rosenberg

Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator.

~ J.g. Ballard

She's got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

Beautiful people don't need coats. They've got their auras to keep them warm.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

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

~ I.m. Pei

I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.” …Anias Nin

~ Angelic Artiaga

I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.

~ Jeanette Winterson

She stared at the bullwhip coiled Indiana Jones-style at his narrow waist, then at the black-handled dagger sheathed on his right hip. An obsidian rapier--Fae-forged and unbreakable--almost merged with one of the taped seams that ran down the sides of his pants. He even wore a dagger gunslinger-style at his hip. Dear Goddess, the man was a walking arsenal, but he was sexy as hell.

~ Kryssie Fortune

All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew cottons with big full skirts and university personalities would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to be hard and urban.

~ Elizabeth Winder

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

~ Michael Montoure

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.

~ Michael Montoure

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

All women should feel as Sex Subjects if they want and choose so without fear of repressions, condemnations and put down and without the need to pay them for that.Being freely a sexy and seductive woman is allowed only for few privileged professions: actresses, dancers, models, singers, prostitutes. They all do it for work. You can pay for them being sexy.If a sexy woman is openly adored by a man, the woman remains as a woman, she is not turning into a table, a cup or a bill of money. She is still the Subject who knows her power.

~ Mai Loog

Moses threw the spent cigarette butt to the ground. It bounced once then lay still. A lazy wisp of smoke drifted towards the reaching shadows. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed flakes of grit from the seat of his jeans. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he moved away from the pipe and began to negotiate a route down the alley. A rivulet of cans, wrappers and remnants of kebabs dotted the ground like flotsam; the waste of nights past, discarded by the nameless, faceless masses marking their territories with futile gestures. Oh, sure, the trash was still emptied these days – there were still garbage men around, but it just delayed the inevitable, prolonging the agony of a tired and dying world.

~ Scott Kaelen

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

Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?

~ Tom Mcdonough

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

Let's do it right. This is for the ages.

~ I.m. Pei

You cannot defend your design without knowing what you're designing for.

~ I.m. Pei

It's a strange city... filled with things that are not obvious.

~ A.m. Homes

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time

~ Patrick Geddes

Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days’ time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The rush of life causes people to drown in the temporary. He wishes to dip into eternity before he leaves.

~ Isa Kamari

For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.

~ Isa Kamari

An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it’s where even the rich use public transportation

~ Enrique Penalosa

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine;And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine

~ George Washington Sears

The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments

~ Hélène Baronne D’oettingen

Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.

~ Charles Krauthammer