Quotes About Cities

Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark's spinets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the color of grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the unbandaging of great giants in agony.

All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is a City of God which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting.

On the cities of Venice and Varanasi] Everywhere you look there is evidence of the enchantment of decay, of a kind of beauty that can only be revealed by a long, slow fading.

I suffered from other kinds of pangs. I was prone to the most excessive dreaming, of such intensity and realism that when I awakened I felt I lost an entire universe of legends, myths, figures and cities of such color that they made our room seem a thousand times more bare, the poverty of the table more acute.

This is good news indeed, since North Koreans are now gradually getting used to the idea that their houses are highly valuable. This might help them when/if the two Koreas unify. North Korean cities are liable to be flooded with swarms of rich South Korean real estate dealers looking to take advantage of North Korean naivety in real estate matters. Hopefully, if the North Koreans learn a thing or two about the real estate trade beforehand, they will be less vulnerable to such machinations.

The wind plays the world like an instrument. Blows through trees like flutes. But trees won't grow in cement. And as heart beats bring percussion fallen trees bring repercussions. Cities play upon our souls like broken drums.

The second-century Letter to Diognetus put it beautifully: "As the soul is in the body, so Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world…. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible.

You all say you need us. Well, maybe you do, but not to help, with the millions of bubbly new minds about to be unleashed, with all the cities coming awake at last. Together, you're more than enough to change the world without us. So from now on, David and I are here to stand in your way. You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

you're infamous, Tally. Everyone's terrified of you. The new system may have made the other cities nervous, but they seem to think my little gang of psychotic sixteen-year-olds is worse - Cable to Tally

Bangkok is one of the world's great cities, all of which own red-light districts that find their ways into the pages of novels from time to time. The sex industry in Thailand is smaller per capita because the Thais are less coy about it than many other people. Most visitors to the kingdom enjoy wonderful vacations without coming across any evidence of sleaze at all

I disliked the attitude of those who came up from the cities to hunt—their braggadocio, their faux machismo, the unpleasant transformative effect of guns and camouflage on otherwise unremarkable men, for in my experience it was generally men who hunted in this way.

Bugs would eat the wax. Chaw the old canvas. And one day there will be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through glass. Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came...

The two cities I've found very hard to leave in my life were New York and Buenos Aires.

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

Historically, most people were far too poor to let their tastes in entertainment guide where they chose to live, and cities were hardly pleasure zones. Yet as people have become richer, they have increasingly chosen cities based on lifestyle—and the consumer city was born.

The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren't structures; cities are people.

For all the emphasis we place on our multicultural cities, they epitomise our oligarchic reality.

the murder rate has fallen by 16.7 per cent in the US cities since the turn of the century, while rising by 16.9 per cent in the suburbs – almost an exact mirror image.42

By the time Chester was born in i9o9, an agricultural depression, race riots in northern and southern cities, and nearly a thousand lynchings had further aggravated the precariousness of black lives.

Timothy Beatley in Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011)

In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we're startled, we're alarmed.

Others haven't had the same luck. In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we're startled, we're alarmed.

If love is exiled from cities, their good nature becomes an evil nature.

When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.