Quotes About City

A city park in this fix, afflicted (for in such cases it is an affliction) with a good-sized terrain, is figuratively in the same position as a large store in a bad economic location.

The idea of sorting out certain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their relationship with the workaday city dovetailed nicely with the Garden City teachings.

The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing.

Such streets need controls to defend them from the ruin that completely permissive diversity might indeed bring them. But the controls needed are not controls on kinds of uses. The controls needed are controls on the scale of street frontage permitted to a use. This is so obvious and so ubiquitous a city problem that one would think its solution must be among the concerns of zoning theory. Yet the very existence of the problem is not even recognized in zoning theory.

Frequent borders, whether formed by arterial highways, institutions, projects, campuses, industrial parks, or any other massive uses of special land, can in this way tear a city to tatters.

One seemingly logical step is taken after another, each step plausible and apparently defensible in itself; and the peculiar result is a form of city which is not easier to use and to get around in, but on the contrary more scattered, more cumbersome, more time wasting, expensive and aggravating for cross-use.

Routine, ruthless, wasteful, oversimplified solutions for all manner of city physical needs (let alone social and economic needs) have to be devised by administrative systems which have lost the power to comprehend, to handle and to value an infinity of vital, unique, intricate and interlocked details.

Nevertheless, aims of this kind cannot be pursued unless those responsible for diagnosis, for devising tactics, for recommending actions and for carrying out actions know what they are doing. They must know it not in some generalized way, but in terms of the precise and unique places in a city with which they are dealing. Much of what they need to know they can learn from no one but the people of the place, because nobody else knows enough about it.

Altogether, there are eight types of illusions. Magic, a dream, a bubble, a rainbow, lightning, the moon reflected in water, a mirage, and a city of celestial musicians." Vernon

We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand

On the anvil of August, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat.

Unlike London or other big cities, there's a great tolerance for motorbikes in Ireland. Culturally, it's quite different.

Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.

Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, 'Here I am! I am powerful!' to the world.

In New York you can actually run into people on the street, unlike in California where you're always in the car.

In terms of just the number of people who run, New York is really unlike any other city. We have such a culture of people who would qualify themselves as runners, and then we have a whole host of people who maybe wouldn't consider themselves a part of that community, but who do actively run, whether it's for exercise or whatever reason they want.

The world I describe is about how people live now. It's not about zany people with unlimited, inexplicable funds in an apartment somewhere.

Before I moved here, I had no desire to become a dancer. But when I saw the dance schools in the city and the massive opportunities, I decided to give it a shot. Mumbai being a land of unlimited possibilities gave me the confidence to go for it.

Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

For me, New York has always been a city of unpredictability. You can never guess what's going to happen next.

Given the importance of Washington, outsiders probably have an unrealistic perspective on how large the city is. The fact is, Washington D.C. is a small town, and most everyone knows most everyone else. That person of the other party who you despise will someday be at your daughter's birthday party.

I love the ocean, wide-open space and trees, but I'm not a gardener or anything like that. I think I may be, eventually. I was raised in the city, so I don't have that skill set, but my heart is more with the dirt than the concrete. It's an unrequited love with nature - a one-way love affair.

There was a sense of all the things that go on on the street, particularly in New York, that you are just completely unaware of, that that conversation could be happening at any time. I loved the instability of the camera. It's just an unstable world.