Quotes About Urban

There wasn't a tear to be seen on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them walked down to Schrafft's. Only him, again, leaning by the door, suit jacket and fedora, the sunlight striking gold, the leg he had favored bent back and pressed against the building. He was smoking a cigarette. He was the handsomest man on the block. He was waiting for her.

She squinted against the sunlight on taxi hoods and bus windows, heard the rushing now of air and of taxis, wheezing buses, and underneath it all something banging—a loosened street sign, a trapped can, a distant hammer—rhythmic and methodical. The march of time.

It was either God's reply or just April again, in the wind tunnel that was midtown

She could feel the crunch of city grit between her back teeth.

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

He'd told her about his asphalt water lilies and his sidewalk Van Goghs

My kids are tough," said Nina. He scoffed. "I work in Harvard Square. My art's been peed on.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts

Empire State's orange shoulders lifted above the Hell

Electric Networks spread fear of murder on the streets

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer

San Francisco is the place where most people were last seen

The only thing worse than a city full of people is a city with no people at all.

That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.

It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula.

Jack: Well, I've never been to New York, but I hear it's for assholes. Odile: It's not. Jack: Well, that's what I heard. Cool people don't live there anymore, They all live here. In Chicago.

The projects looked like a place where dreams went to commit suicide and hope got screwed in the ass.

I'm not a car guy. The subway gets me where I need to go efficiently and cheaply, and I don't worry about traffic.

Keeping the gun pointed at her, I flipped the safety off. All at once I could hear the noise of the city, the traffic pulsing on the expressway, the subways roaring under the sidewalks, millions of people out talking and driving around, living their lives. I smelled coffee and cigarettes and perfume and wet trees, tasted it in the air. It was all incredibly alive, like my heart and lungs working on overload, resonating in my chest and pounding through my skull.

I got the sense that she was wired into the night itself, aware of every fluctuation of electricity and sound, the reflections in glass and steel.

Not only has Japan developed with an impossibly small supply of cultivable land per capita, but large swathes of that land have been relentlessly gobbled up by its urban and industrial development. This trend has long been exacerbated by a cultural aversion to high-rise building. The insistence on low-rise, sadly, has done nothing to make modern Japanese construction more attractive.

I really want to live in New York. That's the city of my dreams.

Without the notion of sacred space, it is doubtful cities could ever have developed anywhere in the world.