Quotes About City

When you run into someone in NY it is usually a pleasant surprise. When you run into someone in LA you usually had a car accident.

If you grow up in the suburbs, you hear of people dying of old age, car wrecks, cancer. In the city, it's always people dying of violence or stray bullets.

Nobody uses his car in New York, because so many people use it that traffic is congested and unbearably slow.

The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her . . . so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike.

This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte.

If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean.

When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.

The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.

Berlin Stays Red

En el cielo había nubes nocturnas, claras y teñidas por la luz amarillenta de la ciudad, con perspectivas negras hacia las estrellas. El viento era tan débil que en los árboles no se movían más que las hojas, y solamente las que estaban al final de las ramas.

As she ran off, Aly and Cass sank to the ground, exhaling with relief. I looked back the way we'd come. I could see through the gate and down a long, sloped path to the city plaza. Marco was nowhere in sight.

This is capitalism's constant urban conundrum: what makes cities profitable is inherently at odds with the needs of the poor and middle classes (who are needed for a city to function), and centrally located land has inherent value if it can be made amenable to the rich. Gentrification may be a new expression of this conflict between land value and the needs of the poor, but it's a problem as old as capitalism itself.

But the city began spending on different things, turning away from social programs that help the poor and toward ones that help the rich—namely, subsidizing redevelopment. The near-bankruptcy made New York the first US city to employ gentrification as governance.

if you tried to take into account all the heartbreak behind the lighted windows of a single city on a single night, your head would explode clean off your neck. [Ineffectual Tribute to Len]

It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of oral painting could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. (A Short Guide To The City)

I couldn't help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city--and, although we don't like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

There ought to be an ordinance that a man can't work for the same outfit as his wife; hell, even in the same city.

the uproar of radios, traffic noises, the signs and people lulled him. They blotted out his inner worries.

I speak to H. in a bar in downtown L.A. Over a schooner of beer he waits out the day

It was drizzling, but even if there'd been no clouds the city sky was too tainted with light to show the stars. Pantalaimon thought they were going north, but who could tell? Endless streets of little identical brick houses, with gardens only big enough for a dustbin...

Lyra felt herself moving into a kind of trance beyond sleep and waking: a state of conscious dreaming, almost, in which she was dreaming that she was being carried by bears to a city in the stars. She

One half of the world glows with reflected sunlight. The other half is dark, speckled with little city lights.