Quotes About City

Moscow swam in color. Hazy floodlights of Red Square mixed with the neon of casinos in Revolution Square. Light wormed its way from the underground mall in the Manezh. Spotlights crowned new towers of glass and polished stone, each tower capped by a spire. Gilded domes still floated around the Garden Ring, but all night earth-movers tore at the old city and dug widening pools of light to raise a modern, vertical Moscow more like Houston or Dubai.

Medieval Romans colonized the vestiges of the ancient city as sea creatures might a sunken ship. Amphitheatres and temples were turned into fortified strongholds; the monuments of the imperial capital were used as quarries for building materials. An entire neighbourhood was devoted to burning classical marbles, sculptures included, to turn them into lime: steadily reducing the glories of antiquity to powder.

This magical song took them all far from the muted peace of the suburban blocks they were familiar with, far, farther back to their youth, when they were smooth skinned, slim and sassy, when they walked the city streets with swinging hips, when their worlds delivered pearls.

She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.

He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn't tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?

She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them. She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on earth in patterns and pathways and towers.

there were only three kinds of people in this city – security guards, people who need security guards, and thieves.

She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.

Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as "Breaking News." Nobody pointed out the irony.

stilts, the ground floors given over to parking. It's a good idea in this car-maddened city

well as street vendors crying their wares. The mob had

I soon adapted to Muriel's fascination with gay bars. Whenever she came to the city, she explained to me, she came to go barring. She never felt truly alive except in gay bars, she said, and needed them like a shot in the arm.

Even when they were rushing, and in Moscow there's always a kind of rush, people lack the desperation of New York.

From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.

No, this is what has suddenly consumed me: if something were to happen on the island of Manhattan, the fact that we are, indeed, on an island would suddenly become a deep and terrible problem. I am wholly unequipped for a disaster. Vulnerable. The safety in numbers I had always felt in the city was an illusion. All those numbers could turn against each other under the right circumstances.

There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.

She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city.

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

She stood in quiet excitement when the boat sailed back and she saw the city growing again to meet her. She stretched her arms wide. The city expanded, to her elbows, to her wrists, beyond her fingertips. Then the skyscrapers rose over her head, and she was back… ---Dominique.

There are cities in which to spend a fortune and cities in which to make one; only in the rare great city can one accomplish both.

it gave me a little plastic book with four fold-outs, maps of the city's transit system. When I wanted to go somewhere, I touched the silver-printed name - street, level, square - and instantly on the map a circuit of all the necessary connections lit up. I could also travel by gleeder. Or by rast. Or - finally - on foot; therefore, four maps

In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16's, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners

Ho guardato in alto, oltre le insegne illuminate e, obliqua su un grattacielo, c'era la luna. Le ho detto: Cosa ci fa una ragazza come te in un posto come questo?

just north of the city—after all, he might have witnessed something—they saw a gun in plain view on the seat of his car. When Berkowitz emerged from his apartment