Quotes About Urban

Though I couldn't see it, I knew the Atlantic was behind the buildings on the other side of the street. Everything seemed so alien that it was hard to believe I was only a few miles from Manhattan.

Remarkable," he'd called my poems at our first meeting. "So urban and breezy. So droll and cosmopolitan. It's rare to find such profusion of wit in a woman.

Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectual mirrors will take off, as airplanes do. The black planes will take off into the night air and the night winds, sliding past and behind each other, zooming, turning and turning in the redness of the winds, living, never to return.

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.

The quality of life in this city stinks. Is almost nothing. Most people now are deaf-mutes only inside they're screaming. BLOOD. A lot of blood inside is going to fall. MORE and MORE because inside is outside.

The other cars had to pass noisily around us, but there was no anti-parking sign. Through the windshield, we could see another under-bridge area in front of us, and the cars that passed us were forming a line to enter it.

But I can see him studying his newspaper, breaking off regularly to look up at the passers-by on the pavement outside. From the way he does this, I had thought at first that he was waiting for a companion, but it would seem he wishes merely to greet acquaintances as they pass by.

Before we left town, Antonio pulled into a strip mall and went in to get subs and salads, leaving Clay and me half naked and bleeding in the car, and Cain unconscious in the trunk. No wonder I was anxious to get back to Toronto. Spend too much time around these guys and you become a little too nonchalent about blood-soaked clothes and bodies in the trunk

A friendly Londoner gave him a rapid stream of detailed instructions, every word of which he found completely incomprehensible. He thanked the man and walked out of the station.

Out along the dim six-o'clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so's not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box.

The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities.

It is not possible . . . to concentrate enough military planes with military loads over a modern city to destroy that city.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer.

Nosotros, los habitantes de este mundo tercero y postrero, no necesitamos el menor esfuerzo mental para saber en qué consiste el infierno de la opulenta sociedad de consumo, de la tersa y radiante sociedad industrial: nos basta con salir a la calle. Pasan con sus sucias mantas al hombro los hijos de la indigencia. Vienen de los basureros o van hacia ellos. Podemos imaginar los paisajes de apocalipsis donde transcurren sus vidas.

London is a bad habit one hates to lose.

The roaring street is hung for miles With fierce electric fire.

I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.

Many of us want to be nonviolent and we talk very loudly, you know, about being nonviolent. Here in Harlem, where there are probably more black people concentrated than any place in the world, some talk that nonviolent talk too. But we find that they aren't nonviolent with each other. You can go out to Harlem Hospital, where there are more black patients than any hospital in the world, and see them going in there all cut up and shot up and busted up where they got violent with each other.

This was Beijing. A city that never showed its gentle side. You'd die if you didn't fight with it, and there was no end to the fight. Beijing was a city for Sisyphus—you could push and push and push, but ultimately that stone was bound to roll back on you.

Living right in the heart of Tokyo itself is quite like living in the mountains – in the midst of so many people, one hardly sees anyone.

The world is a silence broken by the barking of a stray dog.

was built with London's Docklands in mind and marketed as an "urban village," but has failed to

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.