Quotes About Urban

Any place where the Jewish district is the hipster district is a very surreal and awesome place.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid

A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)

It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street.

A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

spring rustling in the air, like a paper bag blowing along a concrete sidewalk.

Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.

It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home.

I feel an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I've found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

Walking maintains the publicness and viability of public space.

cause London is drowning and I— I live by the river.

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

I retreat from my bars, wondering why people who live outside choose such ugly words. Maybe that is what happens when you are outside, and the world clangs and barrels and shouts twenty-four hours a day, from your radio your television your wife your neighbor the lawn mower down the street and the scream of airplanes from the sky. Maybe then you use ugly words to tell life to shut up.

Las grandes novelas son como las ciudades: lugares cotidianos donde suceden hechos extraordinarios. Todas las vidas posibles se superponen y se entrecruzan en sus calles y una ciudad es también un tejido de relatos.

I think that I would find automobiles a little more interesting if they carried their own parking space with them.

Cairo was, and remains, an ugly, cement-colored, park-free city, dotted with a few bewildering, mind-expanding splendors that make the whole place manic and magical. There was always noise, dirt, and exhaust, the honking of horns and the screeching of brakes. My

People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.

Every evening, the Strip flickers to languid life like some faulty neon tube given a kick. It blinks and fizzles and settles down, gleaming slantwise and constant across the street grid of Bradbury's old quarter like a cryptic grin, like a signal for eager moths.

d) (1850) «De vez en cuando, en las ciudades, abro un periódico. Tengo la sensación de que todo avanza rápidamente. No estamos bailando sobre un volcán, sino sobre las tablas de una letrina, que a mí me huele bastante a podrido. Próximamente, la sociedad se precipitará en la mierda de diecinueve siglos, y se ahogará rápidamente en ella. Se oirán muchos gritos.»

We were moving because Eric's office had moved there, and commutes from Bay Ridge to Long Island City uncomfortably reminded us of Latin American immigrants knifed to death by bigots in subway cars en route to one of their three jobs at two in the morning.

As they pulled up to 88–22 Parsons Boulevard—a large red-brick square