Quotes About Urban

He loved New York. He hated it. It was a cathedral of possibilities, it would never settle down.

She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek...Don't do that, I said. You just met me. This is New York.

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren't New Yorkers anyway, they'd suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still they were moving faster than the cars. Nineteen seventy-five.

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid. Your school wasn't on fire, you were.

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

there was language everywhere; you could read the city, the city was a grammar

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

Lvov is a city like New York City in America. New York City, in truth, was designed on the model of Lvov.

It is a melancholy object to walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and all importuning every passenger for an alms.

each time I cross one of the streets in South Buenos Aires, I think of you, Helen;

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

if you want to be really lonely, try a big city. Everyone's a stranger, and if you don't have just the right kind of contacts, they remain strangers.

the anti-gun urban liberals are really not that much more evolved. They have an equal and opposite fanaticism about guns—that to own one is to be a latent murderer. But worse than that, it's to be tasteless. There is a raft of assumptions that go with gun ownership.

Guns are a trigger for a whole magazine of internal snobberies and prejudices that crackle through white European-American society. There is a salutary sentence for these two groups—the gun lobby and the urban liberal. They are two tribes tied together by guns.

Where politer European cities might have had street mimes, New York has always had the Brechtian street theater of pavement psychodrama: the muttering, bellowing, gesticulating and teetering looney tunes for whom the drugs are no longer working, who look like characters from Exodus, prophets of urban collapse and carnal comeuppance.

God the first garden made, and the first city.

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.

When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.

The excitement and glamour of living in New York had always, for Updike, come bundled with less agreeable sensations. He felt "crowded, physically and spiritually" by the city's "ghastly plentitude, its inexhaustible and endlessly repeated urban muchness.

In both countries rapid inflation caused homegrown produce to be withheld from the urban markets, with hunger and anger the inevitable result.

It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the avenue, separating the bus's pneumatic brakes from the bass chug of the delivery-truck engines and the whir and bump of gliding taxis.