Quotes About Urban

There are so many more people in Tokyo than in New York, but it's pristine. It's so organized, and yet the address system is in complete chaos.

I love London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris - there are a million places I could imagine I like, but N.Y. is home.

I grew up in the countryside and wanted to go to Tokyo. I had Tokyo complex.

My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That's the kind of place we lived in.

I think it is one of the common themes for many Japanese people to choose where to live: Tokyo or their hometown.

I actually came to New York because it was very tolerant. You know, it seems preposterous, ludicrous thing to say in an interview, but I came for the anonymity particularly.

You were not wanted. You were, at best, tolerated. You had to be constantly on your guard, like an animal in a jungle full of beasts of prey. You experienced it all within the short distance of five miles from the gates of St. Peter's to Park Station in the city.

These were the moments that defined the city. They were the waking dreams of a never sleeping metropolis.

The hotel was a blazing citadel, a palace of electricity in the city's cold gloom.

If we were allowed to go online here, I'd tell you to search Wikipedia for chickens plus cannibals so that you could verify." "Wikipedia's your source?" That was laughable. "Oh, please. The poultry industry probably paid big money to get chicken cannibals on there. It's an urban myth." ... "Why would the poultry industry spread a myth that chickens were cannibals?

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)

clochards—homeless people who have been living on the same streets for so long that no one can remember a time when they weren't there.

Mr Bliss looked grave. 'Your brother was very sensible to warn you, Miss Astley - but sadly misinformed. There are no trams in Trafalgur Square - only buses and hansoms, and broughams like our own. Trams are for common people; you should have to go quite as far as Kilburn, I'm afraid, or Camden Town, in order to by struck by a tram

Happily chatting and counting pocket change, patting each other on the back and whistling foolish songs, we go out on the thousand-legged street and miraculously turn into passersby.

Day lets her imagination free with an urban adventure that is not only fast-paced, but also erotic and addictive. [on Eve of Darkness ]

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

the broken window theory, the idea popularized by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.1 She examined why some neighborhoods in New York City were safer than others and concluded that neighborhoods that were well maintained by their inhabitants, including small things like picking up trash and fixing broken windows, tended to have less crime. In other words, by regularly fixing small things, you prevent bigger problems from starting.

The street outside my window is one of a million likeminded Los Angeles streets. Taggers, homeless, families and lovers, thieves and beggars, running children and old women, churches, bars, corner stores, Spanish, Cambodian and Armenian words and accents. I want to hug my street and all within, to feel the throbbing pulse beating its steady rhythm.

The sunrise sky was creeping over the edge of the city in orange-and-scarlet striations, and the clocks were or were not chiming seven.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

I'd like to live in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles all at the same time.

Anyone who lives in this time is concerned with grottiness.