Quotes About Urban

She had Googled psychogeography, just to make sure she wasn't getting it wrong. It was, she discovered, about playfulness, about drifting around urban environments, about getting away from your normal routes, about opening yourself up to randomness.

except in one crucial particular. It wasn't London.

I've started to hate this city, this country, all these STUPID FUCKING PEOPLE.

Sometimes I feel like this whole city is one vast organism. It's like a human being that we're all part of. But we're restricted by the roads, by the waterways, by the tunnels, the trains. It's like our paths are all laid out for us, and there's no way of deviating from them. That's what makes that cat different from us.

the buildings of the city blossoming and withering like flowers from the swamps of Edo

But why is it that it seems that it's already happened? Like it's happened thousands of times before, that it will always happen, like a piece of CCTV footage of the city, stuck on loop.

If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle's eye to enter heaven. . . . This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is an apartment, a man is in the box. . . . Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God. 'Another bullshit night in suck city, my father mutters.

That's how these songs of his seem to come to him anyway. They start from simple everyday occurrences the composer finds himself running into on the tube, say, or maybe on his way down to the off licence. And then they blossom into raging chunks of perfectly matched melody and savage eloquence.

Her love was a glob of phlegm on life's high street.

Tomorrow I'd start learning this city the way I liked best, by moving through it.

In Atlanta at one o'clock on a Thursday morning I would have had downtown to myself, but Seattle's center flickered with flashes of restless, contradictory life.

I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities—it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.

The bourgeoisie, in the feudal framework, settles in small urban centers where it becomes structured and civilized. With the break-up of this framework, the bourgeoisie spreads across all of society, invents the nationalist state, rationalist technology, anonymous urban agglomerations, industrial society, the mass man, and finally the process in which society wavers between the despotism of the mob and the despotism of the expert.

Moreover, he had a peculiar knack, as he walked along the street, of arriving beneath a window just as all sorts of rubbish were being flung out of it: hence he always bore about on his hat scraps of melon rinds and other such articles.

Cuantas más demoliciones, mayor sensación de actividad municipal.

Los Angeles is a city that appears to have been built to satisfy somebody's desire for a cigarette.

At this point, a social flaw that always existed with regard to the [Roman] aristocrats in their townhouses became more evident. No longer finding urban life as secure and amenable as in the early empire, the landed rich gave primacy not to their urban mansions but to their country estates, making the latter their principal residences. The dominant forces in urban life increasingly became the bishops and cathedral clergy.

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purpose could be considered a white Negro.

No one seemed to think it was odd that a Dumpster-diving urban pig farmer was in their midst. In fact, I came to learn that the restaurant industry was filled with other obsessive freaks like Samin, who would never buy a factory-made pickle. I was just another one of those freaks.

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

Bagdad-on-the-Subway.

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.