Quotes About City

Increasingly she's finding it harder to tell the 'real' NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis... as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther back in time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.

Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky. Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't actually, rather have that reason…

The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did.

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

Doc went automotively groping in this weirdness east on Olympic, trying not to flinch at what came popping up out of the gloom in the way of city buses and pedestrians in altered states of consciousness.

Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of an-other, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary . . . or of waves of darkness . . . waves of fire . . . Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It's none of my business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always chang-ing to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears?

a pocket full of spare change and anger unlimited, what more does a 30-year-old innocent need to make his way in the city?

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. - Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)

and isn't it the curse of the drifter, the desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for a half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don't you see, for we're only passing through, we're already ghosts.

What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.

Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life' ... But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are the strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion - even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs...

In the Occident the city has been the greatest opportunity and the worst influence; a place of creation and decay, of freedom and subjection, of riches and poverty, of splendor and misery, of communion and lonesomeness—an optimal milieu for talent, character, vice and corruption. Eric Hoffer

The most thrilling day of the year, the first real day of Spring had enclosed its warm delicious beauty even to London eyes. It had put a spangle in every colour and a new tone in every voice, and city folks walked as though they carried real bodies under their clothes with real live hearts pumping the still blood through.

Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Romney, a board member of the civic and social justice organization New Detroit, said that the "point was to raise all schools" but instead "we've had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.

Caesarea Philippi was the "Sin City" of Israel, where the people worshiped Caesar, Baal, and Pan through sexual immorality and wild partying.

Thank you. You've made me feel like Cinderella." Except she hadn't put thousands of lives in danger. "This is no fairy tale." Jane closed the bag and frowned. "It's more like you're Cassandra running to warn the Trojans about the big wooden horse full of soldiers who plan to burn the city." She pressed the bag into my hand. "Let us hope you have better luck than she did.

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves.

The city no longer appeals to me for the cultural experiences and possessions I might acquire there, but because its population is less homogeneous than Plains society. Its holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all its diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow

The warm humid air of New York clung to the night, unwilling to relinquish its suffocating hold. And yet to Eva, the city had an underlying hum of possibility; a constant forward motion that promised, no matter what, that change was on its way.

Living among towers can tempt you into complacency.

No, I love Montreal... I think I love Montreal more than Montreal loves me... I love the food there.

It takes analytical skills worthy of a degree in civil engineering to understand when and where one is allowed to leave a car in Montreal.