Quotes About City

while the hookers and junkies spun like windblown litter in their wake.

It was a completely innocent remark. To me, the subway is more than a quick way to get from one place to another. It is New York in miniature, an intimate glimpse of the city. You rub shoulders with everyone who lives here, find out what they're reading, see what they're wearing, eavesdrop on their conversations.

Nairobi: la ciudad, vacía, no se había despertado aún de su perezoso sueño de domingo

A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.

We climbed the Sea-End Tower in the lost city of Toronto as the High King and his comrades did on the Quest. It's still standing, our lake-boat touched there on our way east

They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not very far at all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.

a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves.

Imagine a pair of woman's lips," Mogor whispered, "puckering for a kiss. That is the city of Florence, narrow at the edges, swelling at the center, with the Arno flowing through between, parting the two lips, the upper and the lower. The city is an enchantress. When it kisses you, you are lost, whether you be commoner or king.

To live in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm.

The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence.

I don't want to take the women into the city until I know how things stand.' ' I'll tell you precisely how they stand,' Nicolo bitterly replied. 'The absolute ruler of this city is a Medici. The Pope is a Medici. People round here say that probably God is a Medici and as for the Devil, he's definitely one, beyond any doubt.

The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of - I'm making it sound too noble; no otorund phrases must be used. Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death.

The city is where you go to hide, she said. In the country, in small towns or in the fields or forests, everybody sees you and everyone knows your business. In the city you are invisible because nobody cares.

En esta ciudad, Mahound, el negociante-profeta, está fundando una de las grandes religiones del mundo;

And as for the city itself - it was to be the capital of Maharashtra; or of both Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state of its own...while the government tried to work out what on earth to do, the city's inhabitants decided to encourage it to be quick. Riots proliferated..

I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one's selfhood or erase it?

Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal.

But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the cartographers

London had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future.

can honor be expected of a man who is preparing to storm the city of his birth?

If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place.

I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time.