Quotes About Urban

Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?" "You'd prefer retail?

Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

a pocket full of spare change and anger unlimited, what more does a 30-year-old innocent need to make his way in the city?

New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn't going to tell it. —DONALD E. WESTLAKE

The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.

How strange tonight, this city. As if something trembled below its surface, waiting to burst through.

The burgeoning of the American welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century and the declining effectiveness of the American criminal justice system at the same time allowed borrowed and counterproductive cultural traits to continue and flourish among those blacks who had not yet moved beyond that culture, thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous, and self-destructive subculture in many urban ghettos.

More than half of Detroit's children now attend charters—second in the nation only to New Orleans (and possibly Flint, Michigan)—and 80 percent of these are for-profit.

No nice men are good at getting taxis.

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves.

The land lives," is how one young rancher put it to me. But now that the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area contains more people than Montana and the Dakotas combined, I fear that his attitude will prove incomprehensible to modern, urban Americans who live as if they have outgrown the land that feeds them, as incomprehensible as a similar reverence for the land among Native Americans was to the railroad barons, merchants, and immigrant farmers of a century ago.

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.

The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

Living among towers can tempt you into complacency.

It takes analytical skills worthy of a degree in civil engineering to understand when and where one is allowed to leave a car in Montreal.

I have some road rage inside of me. Traffic, especially in L.A., is a pet peeve of mine.

I hate going out in Brighton now. It's different in London. People respect you more there.

In the hundred and fifty years before the great visitation of 1665 there were only a dozen years when London was free from plague.

Urban survival rule 22: Never annoy an armed man.

A mini-cab later and he arrived in Stockwell, where the pit bulls travelled in twos. Ludlow Road is near the tube station, a short mugging away.

850 square feet. It's what forced the Bowmans and everyone else on the Avenues outside. And it was these outdoor spaces—not the closed-in world of flats and row houses of Verdun—that defined them.

A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool's head--and there is London Town.

Accursed be the city where the laws would stifle nature's!