Quotes About City

And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entre - the working girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted male - as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.

I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets... I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without.

I love New York on summer afternoons when every one's away. There's something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness

He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

En el crepúsculo encantado de la metrópolis a veces sentía una fascinante soledad, y la sentía en otros: pobres y jóvenes oficinistas que rondaban los escaparates hasta que llegaba la hora de su solitaria cena en un restaurante; jóvenes oficinistas al anochecer, desperdiciando los momentos más intensos de la noche y de la vida.

It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. Not

Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

Me gustaba pasear por la Quinta Avenida y elegir a alguna mujer romántica entre la multitud e imaginar que, en cinco minutos, yo entraría en su vida, y que nunca lo sabría nadie ni nadie lo desaprobaría.

New York, he supposed, was home—the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams.

All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness – and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

Because of the chasm which his grandfather's visit had opened before him, and the consequent revulsion from his late mode of life, it was inevitable that he should look around in this suddenly hostile city for the friends and environments that had once seemed the warmest and most secure. His fist step was a desperate attempt to get back his old apartment.

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street—and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art—and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

I liked to walk up Fith Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.

Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

La propia ciudad, a pesar de que ella se hubiese ido estaba impregnada de una belleza melancólica [...] Alargó la mano desesperadamente como para atrapar solo una brizna de aire, para salvar un fragmento del lugar que ella había hecho precioso para él. Pero todo pasaba demasiado deprisa ya para sus ojos empañados y supo que había perdido para siempre aquella parte que era la más pura y la mejor.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.