CITIES QUOTES
quotations about cities
Now in the city there are two worlds. One world has walls around it and one world has people around it. The second world is outside, with the late-winter sky and the bare trees and the hard pavements that stretch in every direction, and with the bright shining shop windows and the chattering crowds. This world has a sightless malicious face, which is the face of the crowd. The face of the crowd is not immediately to be seen, it only becomes apparent after a while, when it shows itself in wondering side-long looks and sharp glances.
MAEVE BRENNAN
The Visitor
I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, contract not only an effeminacy of habit but even of thinking.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
"The Bee"
There's something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.
CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON
Empty Roads & Broken Bottles
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
JANE JACOBS
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men.
JOHN MILTON
L'Allegro
How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
TONI MORRISON
Jazz
City’s just a jungle; more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away
I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down
BOB DYLAN
"Mississippi"
The city was a vast and stationary carousel, forever boarded by millions of would-be passengers who took their seats, waited and then dismounted.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
God made the country, and man made the town.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
A home in the country is what a city man hopes to buy and a farmer hopes to sell.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.
NEAL SHUSTERMAN
Downsiders
Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.
BIBLE
Matthew 5:14
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER
Harper's, January 1987
Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured today by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city; that is, between him and what the city stands for -- the centre of mass.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Crowds
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Worpswede
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.
ITALO CALVINO
Invisible Cities
Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Seven Old Men,", Flowers of Evil
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Where the Blue Begins
What is the city but the people?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Coriolanus
In the Big City large and sudden things happen. You round a corner and thrust the rib of your umbrella into the eye of your old friend from Kootenai Falls. You stroll out to pluck a Sweet William in the park -- and lo! bandits attack you -- you are ambulanced to the hospital -- you marry your nurse; are divorced -- get squeezed while short on U. P. S. and D. O. W. N. S. -- stand in the bread line -- marry an heiress, take out your laundry and pay your club dues -- seemingly all in the wink of an eye.... The City is a sprightly youngster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get licked off.
O. HENRY
"The Complete Life of John Hopkins"