Quotes About City

If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of the street, on the roof of a house. It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.

corner of the Champs-Élysées and the rue de Berri.30

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake.

Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.

Si rese conto di quanto dovessero essere nere le notti nel centro di una città di duecento anni fa [...] e di come gli edifici potessero trovare riposo, ciechi ed esanimi come le persone addormentate al loro interno.

That is the great luxury of long-existing and accepted segregation in New York and almost every other major city of our nation nowadays. Nothing needs to be imposed on anyone. The evil is already set in stone. We just move in.

A balancing act of equally unlikely options was the only answer that the city and the nation gave to the requests of these poor people. This juggling of options—in this instance, countering school-funding efforts with the need for preschool—does no good if neither of these options is to be enacted anyway and if the act of balancing only serves to guarantee our permanent inaction in both areas.

New York didn't set out to charm you. It was like God that way. You had to bring a lot of the enthusiasm yourself.

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

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

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

In effetti, il più famoso palazzo di New York è fatto di materiali provenienti da quasi tutti i posti tranne New York, proprio come la città deve la sua grandezza agli immigrati

Porque agora sabe que ela brilhará para ele entre mil estrelas no céu sem igual da cidade negra.

Edimburgo o York o Santiago de Compostela pueden mentir eternidad; no así Buenos Aires, que hemos visto brotar de un modo esporádico, entre los huecos y los callejones de tierra.

Buenos Aires] No nos une el amor sino el espanto. Será por eso que la quiero tanto

A mí se me hace cuento que empezó Buenos Aires: La juzgo tan eterna como el agua y como el aire.

Out of this city marched armies that seemed to be great, and afterwards were when glory had magnified them. As the years went by, an occasional soldier returned, and with a foreign trace to his speech, told tales of what had happened to him in places called Ituzaingo or Ayacucho. These things, now, are as if they had never been. --Martin Fierro

perhaps the intentions of the poet are not that important. What is important nowadays is that although Homer might have thought he was telling that story, he was actually telling something far finer: the story of a man, a hero, who is attacking a city he knows he will never conquer, who knows he will die before it falls; and the still more stirring tale of men defending a city whose doom is already known to them, a city that is already in flames.

Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time. It can be an evening just outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or maps, or chess, or coffee….

Hard to believe Buenos Aires had any beginning. I feel it to be as eternal as air and water.

Glencairn, tal vez omnipotente en la ciudad que una firma al pie de un decreto le destinó, era una mera cifra en los engranajes de la administración del Imperio.

It really does look like musical sheets, frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innumerable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows, or curved crownings of Coducci cathedrals, not to mention the violin necks of gondolas. In fact, the whole city, especially at night, resembles a gigantic orchestra, with dimly lit music stands of palazzi, with a restless chorus of waves, with the falsetto of a star in the winter sky.