Quotes About Urban

On average the total walking of an American these days—that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.

By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.

Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through it, so to speak.

this is a little-known fact but absolute truth—that when they dedicate a new multistory car park, the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It's true.

The French have become professional, scientific, and urban. The Italians are improvising amateurs, following rustic preparations handed down for generations. The Italians, it could be said, were still playing with their food.

Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe

Since nobody reacts to car alarms anymore, stop putting alarms in cars. Face it. At this point, car alarms are like Glenn Beck: annoying, pointless, and everyone's finally learned to ignore them. When I hear one, my first thought is: "Please, God, I hope someone is stealing that car so they'll drive it away from my window.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick leans against the drugstore, smoking, brushing her hair like a machine

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

d.c. is the nation's capital. It also leads the country in murder

Sobre la huerta y el patio las torres de Balvanera y aquella muerte casual en una esquina cualquiera. No veo los rasgos. Veo, bajo el farol amarillo, el choque de hombres o sombras y esa víbora, el cuchillo

Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.

the noise of Manhattan woke me as effectively as a jolt of caffeine. The blaring of horns and the thud of tires over a manhole cover invigorated me. Rapid-moving streams of pedestrians flanked both sides of the clogged street, while buildings stretched ambitiously toward the sky, keeping us in shadow even as the sun climbed.

The storerooms are full of hearts. This is the city of spare parts.

Remember how you asked me where would I like to live best, the country or the city? And you said... And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both?

When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete.

New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.

The city had faded my tan, though. I looked yellow as a Chinaman. Ordinarily, I would have been nervous about my dress and my odd colour, but being with Doreen made me forget my worries. I felt wise and cynical as all hell.

Every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles and hour.

Don't let the wicked city get you down

the city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

I let the lights and the faces come at me. I let the nerves tap out signals to my brain center. I let go. The pink, green, and yellow neons flashed on and off with a definite rhythm, each with its own particular tempo. Together they screamed out a syncopated color rhapsody. The faces; the cafés; the speed of light, steel cars. Swift; quick. Red; green. Flash; off. Stop; go.

Don't let the wicked city get you down

I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.