Quotes About Urban

Reminds me of that urban legend about hearing voices in the white noise of a television tuned to a station that's off the air

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store.

At intersections and crowded areas between sedans and trucks the gutter reflected the bitter pastels of metropolitan neon, rainbows hacked down to earth and dirt.

He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth.

Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, and already gentrification had resumed.

The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer.

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

The light at this hour, on this street, is the secondhand gray of ghetto twilight, a dull mercury color.

The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow

the city," he said diplomatically.

In this city, the rich had some room, and the middle class had less, and the poor had none.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm.

Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered through hallowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private name which he called himself in his own thoughts.

when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth

One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.