Quotes About Urban

New Jersey was hard to define because it was a hodgepodge. Up north, it was the suburbs of New York City. To the southwest, it was the suburbs of Philadelphia. Those two major cities drained resources and attention from New Jersey's own urban centers, leaving Newark and Camden and the like sucking for life like a retiree with an oxygen tank at an Atlantic City casino. The suburbs were lush and green. The cities were destitute and concrete. And so it goes.

Times Square is an assault on every sense, and somehow that includes not only scent but taste. Everything is in motion and swirling and you want to give the entire square a giant Adderall. There

Raisa Mora's street was packed with seen-better-days row houses. Maya found the right address and headed up steps of cracked concrete. She pressed the buzzer, listened for footsteps, heard nothing. Smashed bottles lined the walk. Two doors down a man in an open flannel shirt over a wifebeater tee gave her a toothless smile. They

Newark, New Jersey. The bad part. Almost a redundancy. Decay was the first word that came to mind. The buildings were more than falling apart - they actually seemed to be breaking down, melting from some sort of acid onslaught. Here urban renewal was about as familiar a concept as time travel. The surroundings looked more like a war newsreel - Frankfurt after the Allies' bombing - than a habitable dwelling.

A yellow car—nay, a speaker on wheels—cruised by, blaring a rap tune. The bass was set so high that Myron felt the vibrations in his chest. He could not make out the lyrics, but they sounded angry.

Whores hung out the windows like shreds of leftover Christmas decorations.

We live in weird times and they are in Brooklyn.

Weapons were almost a birthright in the state of Texas; rich or poor, urban or rural, people like their guns. They were a rite of passage for many young men, a symbol of maturity, when they received their first .22 rifle, usually sometime in the second or third grade. But don't try to take them away. Never can tell when you might have to shoot a rabid armadillo or somebody climbing through the window of your seventeenth-story apartment in Houston.

The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground

Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

People say 'The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.

Transportation is the center of the world! It is the glue of our daily lives. When it goes well, we don't see it. When it goes wrong, it negatively colors our day, makes us feel angry and impotent, curtails our possibilities.

I've become a huge fan of the subway, even though I've gotten lost... well, not lost, but went the wrong direction on the subway a couple of times.

At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.

If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest.

In L.A., I have more of a yard existence, and so I enjoy walking my two little dogs in New York - one's a Maltese and the other's a Shih Tzu.

Take a walk around many of our cities and you will find areas of deprivation, high worklessness and educational failure only yards from areas of prosperity and employment.

Yeah, you got the family dog and the white picket fence, and you just think that's all there is. Some of us had to grow up in poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and we just had to adapt to our environment. I know that it's wrong. But people act like it's some crazy thing they never heard of. They don't know.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

When you live in Manchester and it's raining every day, you've got to imagine the sun sometimes. When you're brought up in concrete, you aim for the green leaves. And when you get to the green leaves, you yearn again for concrete.

The downside to the Whole Foods experience is that its success is driven by one of our era's more grotesque phenomena: the upwardly-mobile urban dweller, the one who wants to indulge class-conscious epicurean yearnings and save the world, too.

Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas.