Quotes About Suburbia

I'm from Long Island, which is a very cookie-cutter place.

Why America has never made the connection between tract housing and psychosis is beyond me

Nobody lived around here. It was one of those American neighborhoods in which upper middle-income workers were warehoused, but in which very little real, actual living was done.

The chubby white suburban teenagers impersonating cops were precisely the kind of men to whom we would have preferred not to unload this story.

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.

Enter Ronald Reagan. Roosevelt's political vision was no longer compelling to members of the relatively affluent, hyperindividualized, and suburbanized society America had become.

Americans sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work and go about our daily business," wrote social critic James Howard Kunstler in 1996. "We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we're overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight… as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable.

The suburban housewife -- she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife -- freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment.

There's something crazily beautiful about it, the banks of stacked illuminated signs- Sauna Hut, Sheer Elegance, Waterbeds USA, Chiropractic Here, Benihana, Ideal Uniform- gorse rolling from curbed island to curbed island, across the endless parking lots like suburban tumbleweed. Last week, I watched one roll over a lit cigarette, flaring brightly. If there'd been anything natural in its path, it might have started a fire.

But it's the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.

Prowl along the fringes of residential neighborhoods until you find the word "sucker" scratched into a tree or fencepost, usually with an arrow indicating the proper house.

We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors.

The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as "a collective effort to live a private life." In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction—the tragedy of American domestic

The great suburban mansions and modest tract homes are often silent all day, mausoleums to a dream, the streets hushed until the schoolchildren return home.

Yet the tranquil image of suburbias of the past remains, and continues to influence us, as do traditional concepts of femininity....

El psicólogo habita los suburbios del alma, como el sociólogo la periferia de la sociedad.

Son seres que dejan pocas huellas tras de sí. Personas casi anónimas. Nunca se alejan de ciertas calles de París, de ciertos paisajes de suburbio donde descubrí, por casualidad que habían vivido. Lo que se sabe de ellas se resume en una simple dirección. Y esta precisión topográfica contrasta con todo lo que se igonrará para siempre de su vida... ese vacío, ese bloque de desconocimiento y silencio.