Quotes About City

And it was only as he rose from the bed, his body illuminated by the colored lights of the city, that I caught the glint of calculation behind his eyes, a cold, blank set to his face. His shadow self, and not a nice one.

And it struck him that this was New York: a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it.

Market Street, a steamy puddle at every curb. We find our way down alleys, our crazy eyes making diamonds of the shattered glass that covers the streets and sidewalks. Nothing touches us. We float under the orange streetlamps.

She wanted the city to be full of exclusive places turning people away, as long as they always accommodated her. It didn't work like that. What a stupid place to live—stretched thin, overbooked, sold out in advance.

San Francisco is ours, we've signed our name on it a hundred times: SISTERS OF THE MOON.

Sie sehnte sich stattdessen nach dem Elan und der Zielstrebigkeit, die alle anderen Menschen in der Forty-second Street zu beflügeln schienen: Gruppen lachender Matrosen; Mädchen mit angelegten, eingesprühten Haaren; ältere Paare, die Damen im Pelz - alle eilten im Dämmerlicht dahin. Anna betrachtete sie forschend. Woher wussten sie, wohin es ging?

He had to find her. But where? Ted deliberated this question while downing three espressos in the hotel lobby, letting the caffeine and vodka greet in his brain like fighting fish. Where to look for Sasha in this sprawling, malodorous city? He reviewed the strategies he'd already failed to execute: approaching dissolute kids at the train station and youth hostels, but no, no. He'd waited too long for any of that." (p. 224)

He was sliding into the city's knotty entrails, a poor, untouristed area where the sound of flapping laundry mingled with the bristly chatter of pigeons' wings. Without warning, Sasha pivoted around to face him. She stared, bewildered, into his face. 'Is that?' she stammered. 'Uncle—' 'My God! Sasha!' Ted cried, wildly mugging surprise. He was a lousy fake." (p. 213)

The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity.

Hélène, her eyes once more raised and remote, was deep in a dream. She was Lady Rowena, she was in love, with the deep peaceful passion of a noble soul. This spring morning, the loveliness of the great city, the first wallflowers scenting her lap, had little by little melted her heart.

so full of life and activity, was the sky-line of that accursed city, lurid and spattered with blood (93)

Whenever they were together, fanfares cleared the way before them and they picked up Paris in one hand and put it calmly in their pocket. (64)

Vancouver city was more beautiful to look at across the water than to be in.

Underscoring all of this is Leo—his constant presence in my mind, along with the troubling realization that I deeply associate him with the city and vice versa. So much so, in fact, that leaving New York feels an awful lot like leaving him.

if only because I was returning to Manhattan. Four years in Cambridge had been a pleasant diversion, but I missed the action and nightlife of the best city in the world.

It is like walking in a crowd. A foolish crowd of oddities in a corridor under an enemy city, without an idea of where they are going.

She wants to slap everyone today, to pick up the whole sweat-slick City and punch its lights out.

PIGEON DROPPINGS

A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.

If you wish your house to be well managed, imitate the Spartan Lycurgus. For as he did not fence his city with walls, but fortified the inhabitants by virtue and preserved the city always free;35 so do you not cast around (your house) a large court and raise high towers, but strengthen the dwellers by good-will and fidelity and friendship, and then nothing harmful will enter it, not even if the whole band of wickedness shall array itself against it.

This World is one great City, and one if the substance whereof it is fashioned: a certain period indeed there needs must be, while these give place to those; some must perish for others to succeed; some move and some abide: yet all is full of friends--first God, then Men, whom Nature hath bound by ties of kindred each to each.

Early in life, Lincoln decided that he did not want to live like his father, who in his son's eyes exemplified the values of the pre-market world where people remained content with a subsistence lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs—storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor—essential to the market economy.

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..

But that was New Orleans for you. The old didn't die here. They were just forgotten.