Quotes About City

I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance.

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.

Don't let the city steal your soul.

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing.

One time as dusk slipped into dark, I stood upon a stubble-hill, And saw the stars come floating in Like chaff blown from a mill. And when the dark slipped into night, I saw chaff on the plain below. (The lights of a city smouldered there In phosphorescent glow.) The plain I knew, the sky I knew, But then I wondered in dismay Which were the stars, and which the lights… And I asked the night away.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

New York's a pretty big town. You might take a wrong turn and get lost." "You know," she'd said sweetly, "you might take a hint and do the same.

Early on a spring morning, Policemen Robert Coffman and Jack Carter are working the night watch out of Central Division.

a strange mood settled over the City: proud, defiant, hostile, despairing. All of these things at once. War was coming.

I had grown to love the very city in all its decrepit grandeur. I had walked every inch of it by now. I knew it in the soles of my feet, in the sturdy muscles of my calves. Surely the finding mattered more than the losing.

The fact that he might have other things to do with his time than spend it shepherding his master's head-strong, thousand-ducat-a-night anguisette through one of the most unsavory quarters of the City never crossed my mind.

New York you forgot how cold and bleak winter could be. The neon lights, the moving crowds, the taxi-filled streets stampeded the snow into slush and the slush into gray water that quickly disappeared and you forgot about the bare, desolate ground of the outside world. The loneliness of winter. The

Sache seulement que si,comme je le crains,le malheur s'abat sur cette ville,si les hommes y perdent le droit,unique au monde,de penser librement,c'est tout l'avenir de l'humanité qui sera menacé.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.

It's a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.

Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept. Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude.

I looked out of the window and the streets rolled by. Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for each flying face which trapped my brief attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of all.

It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never — it was the general complaint — left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness.

At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. He walked to the balcony's edge and looked over. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before.

pavements and banging from the walls of houses with

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud.