Quotes About Urban

that underlay the city of Chicago.

In the holy solipsism of the young Now I can't walk thru a city street w/out eying each single pedestrian. I feel thier vibe thru my skin, the hair on my neck --- it rises.

When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.

Thank you slow-walking family in front of me on the sidewalk. No, please, take your time. And definitely spread out, too, so you create a barricade of idiots. I am so thankful that you forced me to walk into the street and risk getting hit by a car in order to pass you so I could resume walking at a normal human pace.

Except for levees, there are no natural land surfaces in the city that are higher than fifteen feet above sea level. Canal Street meets the river at an elevation of fourteen feet above sea level; Jackson Square, only six blocks downriver, is only ten feet above sea level. The Tulane University area is a mere four feet above sea level, while the intersection of Broad and Washington Streets (originally part of the backswamp, now Mid-City) is two feet below sea level.

Misinformation about rattlesnakes is a leitmotiv of the insomniac imagination in Los Angeles.

The Arquitectonica office, which produced the celebrated glass condominium on Brickell Avenue with the fifty-foot cube cut from its center, the frequently photographed "sky patio" in which there floated a palm tree, a Jacuzzi, and a lipstick-red spiral staircase, accompanied its elevations with crayon sketches, all moons and starry skies and airborne maidens, as in a Chagall.

I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

His best moment was when he walked up the majestic stairway to the second floor of the Met; he loved the glorious spaces of old exhibition halls. Not that they knew about old here, with buildings always being blasted and rebuilt higher. How did people in this city keep track of themselves, with so much coming at them at once?

The garden is an unemployed township-based man's cubicle.

I wanna see more gardens and trees in the hood! I wanna see better quality food. I wanna see respect for self!

Well, you go to Holland and everybody's on a bike - nobody would think to have a car.

He used to love small spaces, in fact—had filled his room in Lehrer's apartment with dozens of houseplants with wide frond-like leaves, vines that dangled down from the ceiling like Spanish moss.

Noses to the wind, we inhaled a farrago of scents: charcoal and jasmine, rotting fruit and eucalyptus, gasoline and ammonia, a swirling belch from the city's poorly irrigated gut.

This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and

if you want to live in the city you have to think ahead three turns, and look behind a lie to see the truth and then behind that truth to see the lie.

The incredible length of Bombay sped by, those endless sprawls of buildings, huts and shacks, children squatting and shitting by the tracks, refuse, the crowded grey roads twisting and winding between, all of it blurred but fearsome in its strength, in its very life that grew it unstoppably.

There are lights in the streets and shadows in the house.

herself. Moses laughed along with them. "You would be amazed the things men will say when they're standing around on the street corner. Since my trash route runs through the heart of the business district, I hear a great many

Rape doesn't disturb the peace, it's already part and parcel of the city.

Johnson odiaba y temía la vida en un pueblo. Las calles cerradas y silenciosas lo sumían en la desesperación. En un pueblo, su presencia no encontraba reflejo. La soledad se volvía insoportable. La ciudad tenía sentido porque hacía soportable la soledad.

Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous in gathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.

Those of us who crave the expressive but can't shake off the melancholy walk the street.

Once the city gets into a ba-hoys sa-hystem, he loses the ha-hankerin' for the ca-hountry.