Quotes About Cityscape

New York is full of water, and neither looks it nor acts it. Of the five boroughs of the city, only one—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and yet you can spend months in New York without seeing any water except what comes out of the faucet.

It is a city of villages, closely connected, each village dedicated to a different way of life.

It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. Our ears evolved to be our warning systems. We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and a grey subway;—it affects me as though it were my mother.

He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, You'll see it lovely. I never will. But it WILL be lovely.

I walked down past the Lycée Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-Étienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St.-Michel and worked on down it past the Cluny and the Boulevard St.-Germain until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St.-Michel.

I run from Horatio Street down just past Battery Park City and back. It's amazing to run and see the Statue of Liberty and the ferries coming in. People think if you're not near Central Park, there's nowhere to go, but there's a whole ecosystem happening down here.

Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples.

Everyone should walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I did it three days in a row because it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I've ever had. The view is breathtaking.

Strike set out for his office beneath a sky of dirty silver,

that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.

Rejecting a simple grid for the capital as tiresome and insipid, he argued that such a pattern made sense only for flat cities. Not only would diagonal streets provide contrast and variety, but they would serve as express lanes, shortening the distance between places. Town squares would be situated where diagonal avenues crossed.

Forget the damned motor car and built cities for lovers and friends .

Through the window I saw buildings the size of dollhouses, cars that crawled like ants.

A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories.

skyline reveals a city's purpose and character. Oxford had its dreaming spires; Manhattan its glittering towers; Edinburgh its eccentric spikes.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works.

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows- it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven.

one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses.

the green and cream twilight faded, and the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs began to shine smokily through the tranquil rain.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes...