Quotes About City

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language.

Out in the forsaken city, every other structure, it seems, is burning or collapsing, but here in front of him is the inverse in miniature: the city remains, but the house he occupies is gone.

There is great pleasure in being out in the city before the sun is up, streetlights glowing, the hum of a Parisian day commencing.

Toutes ces fenêtres dans le noir... C'est comme si la ville était devenue une bibliothèque de livres écrits dans une langue inconnue : et les maisons, des rayonnages de volumes devenus illisibles en l'absence de lumière. Mais il y a cette machine au grenier, qui fonctionne de nouveau. Une étincelle dans la nuit.

One section of the old city, tucked against the western walls, becomes a firestorm in which the spires of flames, at their highest, reach three hundred feet. The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than housecats are dragged into the flames.

If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. ... So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

and evening is settling over the hundred thousand rooftops and chimneys of Paris, and all the walls around her are dissolving, the ceilings too, the whole city is disintegrating into smoke, and at last sleep falls over her like a shadow.

From a certain angle, the spring seems so calm: warm, tender, each night redolent and composed. And yet everything radiates tension, as if the city has been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it to the breaking point.

In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue Vauborel, on the sixth and highest floor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.

The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one. Each time she steps outside, she becomes aware of all the windows above her. The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It's what a mouse must feel, she thinks, as it steps from its hole into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.

Opera houses! Cities on the moon! Ridiculous. They would all do better to put their faces on the curbs and wait for the boys who come through the city dragging sledges stacked with corpses.

He thinks of the Christians sitting up on the walls, and the people praying inside the houses and churches of the city, and he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.

Exalted daughter of Zeus," I said, "I beg you, say the magic incantation to deliver me from this form into another, so that I might fly to the city in the clouds where all needs are met and no one suffers and every day shines like the very first days at the birth of the world.

Drunken, foolhardy Aethon mistakes a magical city in a play for a real place. He sets off for Thessaly, land of magic, and accidentally turns himself into a donkey.

Dar Dumnezeu e doar un ochi alb si rece, un sfert de luna atarnand deasupra fumului, clipind într-una, in timp ce oraÈ™ul e facut praf si pulbere.

here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures, It throws the city into relief. The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on.

Each time he returned, he looked slightly different, not merely older, but changed: a new accent, the cigarettes, three sharp knocks on the door. It was as if the city was entering his body and remaking it; he'd look at the low dark houses and wandering hens and farmers with their rope belts as if at film from another century.

Berlin seems not to want to accept the sunlight, as though its buildings have become gloomier and dirtier and more splotchy in the months since he last visited. Though perhaps what has changed are the eyes that see it.

He sat beside Antony in his carriage and arrived unescorted at his colleague's quarters in the city.

The Forum was the city's political, commercial, and legal heart, but it was also its spiritual center, a space more sacred than the city itself.

The first and foremost of these was the tomb of Alexander the Great, which stood at the crossroads of the city's two main avenues.

Alexander had died in 323 B.C. His embalmed body in its gold and crystal coffin was the new city's most sacred relic.

For some commutes, the time spent stuck in traffic will hit four hours per day.