Quotes About Urban

true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing;

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

It had always felt to me as though Washington, D.C., to Boston was one span of stuff. You never really leave Springsteenland, you're just in this unbroken highway and strip-mall landscape.

The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

the mall crowds swaying like wind-blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification

The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.

Scenes An old house in a run-down neighborhood of a Midwestern city.

The first public gas streetlight in the United States is lit in Baltimore, Maryland.

Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.

He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger's pedestrian.

The city's a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.

where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

With the city like this, don't we have greater needs than poetry?

I share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.

New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.

The branches dropped shaggy creepers that, when they reached the earth, hardened into roots and pried apart paving.

The view from the window, particularly if you enjoy neon, is extraordinary.

There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization.

London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once - the urgent and the always - each in earshot of the other.