Quotes About Suburbia

They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.

They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The

Things like this don't happen back in Libertyville, Illinois. You don't get lost in the woods behind your house. You don't get trapped inside a fortress-like wall ten feet tall.

There's a major underlying idea as you grow up that you need to just save your money and get that affordable housing at the edge of town where you're away from the city where all the crime happens or whatever.

When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.

Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest. Which is to say: she cast about for ideas for exacting revenge -- egged windows, flaming bags of dog shit -- and chose the best thing in her limited repertoire.

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest.

The Good Life in Shaker Heights," Cosmopolitan, March 1963

Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest. Which was to say: she cast about for ideas for exacting revenge—egged windows, flaming bags of dog shit—and chose the best thing in her limited repertoire. Three afternoons later, Pearl

Your positive thinker may do well in suburbia but I'd rather be with a lucid depressive in the Arctic, where survival depends on precision and not fooling yourself about your chances on the ice.

Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.

Except for the sign on the front lawn, there wasn't much difference between this house and his. World War II bungalows with clapboard siding. Two bedrooms, one bath. A small lawn that ran out to the street. A peaked roof with dark asphalt shingles. Both ordinary, in all ways. One vacant. One empty.

We're Americans," said Ezekiel. "Nothing is close enough we don't need a car.

The conclusion: killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage done by killers who use other weapons. In fact, someone who walks out her door on the edges of sprawl suburbia is much more likely to die at the hands of a stranger than someone moving through most American central cities or inner suburbs. The only difference is that most of suburbia's killers didn't mean it.

Any suburban mother can state her role sardonically enough in a sentence: it is to deliver children — obstetrically once and by car forever after.

Suburban life is merely motherhood on wheels.

The faltering of our suburban living arrangement is probably certain. The response of suburbanites is not. Will they elect maniacs who promise to make America just like it was in 1997? Will there be a desperate attempt to sustain the unsustainable by authoritarian measures? Will the institutions of order and justice fail in the process?

Suburbia, to me, was the most fantastical, unusual place. I thought it was Disneyland.

I grew up upper middle class.

I wanted to try and change the idea of what we call mainstream. So many times what we call mainstream is upper middle class white suburbia. And anything outside of that is considered niche.

One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing.

Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.

The streets were full of insane & dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.