Quotes About City

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East's exuberant vision of the West, the West's uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

London is often confused with England. The English also live in London but they are only one of the communities which inhabit a true world city.

Artistic flourishes like this may have seemed like a waste of energy, but they were central to the survival of the city and the pride of its inhabitants.

That year, it was as if the city was built of ideas and argument: People walked across a pavement of propaganda, and the walls were plastered with posters. Buildings were coated in debates. Type ran in every direction. Newspapers sprang up, printed a few issues in flurries, then died.

Na een paar maanden constateert hij [Goethe] dat het hem zwaar valt rekenschap af te leggen van zijn verblijf, want - zo noteert hij op 25 januari 1787 - 'zoals men merkt dat de zee steeds dieper wordt naarmate men haar verder opvaart, zo vergaat het ook mij bij het beschouwen van deze stad'. Zich Rome werkelijk toe-eigenen vergt een mensenleven - zo verzucht de auteur enkele maanden later - 'of zelfs het leven van vele mensen, die stap voor stap van elkaar leren.

Typhus was raging and even some at the Danish consulate were infected.... The pharmacies, running out of medicines, sold Orthodox amulets, and people were instructed to tie their sleeves tightly at the wrist so as to prevent lice from creeping in. Former ladies-in-waiting were sleeping on the floor, with eleven former aristocrats sharing one room. A feeling of doom was spreading all over the city, like typhus itself.

Afterwards they walked east along Fourteenth. "Dutch cant we go to your room?" "I ain't got no room. The old stiff wont let me stay and she's got all my stuff. Honest if I dont get a job this week I'm goin to a recruiting sergeant an re-enlist.

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.

And don't forget this, if a man's a success in New York, he's a success!

Oh I know darling, it's nothing but money in New York.

The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets;

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

If Rome, was a city of vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

So this wonderful city Has only dead ashes for me.

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East

St. Augustine was billed as the oldest city in America, the very spot where Ponce de León landed and began exploring.

She loved Manhattan and could not imagine living anywhere else, but her world was upside down now, and, well, there was nothing certain in her future.

I can't stop them. Maybe I can embarrass them from time to time, cost the City some money, but what they're doing here is happening everywhere. We live in a police state and everybody supports the cops.

No way, Nate. I can't stop them. Maybe I can embarrass them from time to time, cost the City some money, but what they're doing here is happening everywhere. We live in a police state and everybody supports the cops." "So you're the last line of defense?" "Yep." "God help us." "Indeed. Thanks for the scoop. I'll be in touch." "Don't mention it.

And when St. Cyril would give a rule to his crowd of Catechumens, If ever thou art sojourning in any city, he says, inquire not simply where the Lord's house is, (for the sects of the profane also make an attempt to call their own dens houses of the Lord,) nor merely where the Church is, but where is the Catholic Church. For this is the peculiar name of this Holy Body, the Mother of us all, which is the Spouse of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt.

When you live in New York or any big city, it is easy to fail at growing up. The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence.

This is not to say that there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells that they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.