Quotes about cities

It is a duty of every citizen to pray for those who are authority and the nation so that each one of us may live a peaceful and quiet lives in sacredness.

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you've lived in one all your life.

My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music.

... something wholly new in religious thought. All other heavens have been gardens, dreamlands: passivities, more or less aimless. Even to the majority among ourselves, heaven is a siesta and not a city.The heaven of Christianity is different from all other heavens, because the religion of Christianity is different from all other religions. Christianity is the religion of cities. It moves among real things. Its sphere is the street, the market-place, the working life of the world... Try to resto

Let the romantic minds meet the romantic cities and after that the candle of romanticism shines on earth like a sun!

Lying flat on my back, with my toes dipped into the lake, I stared at the stars for a second. I guess I should have pondered their beauty and realized the rarity of a sky unsaturated by city lights, or something. But it occurred to me that you could probably see stars from the vast majority of the earth. It was city lights that were actually rare.

Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

There are no doubts that western governments are willfully inducing radiation sickness into segments of their city populations.

The general public has failed to realize that the USA government has built a High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in most cities with the mass deployment of smart radio frequency transmitting utility meters.

Of course, no government official will ever tell you that the cities may be making the people in them ill.

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population of a city or country will just happen to look in the mirror at the same time, and from then on there was a city in the sky, as all cities are if we consider that the sky reaches to the ground, and this city, too, thought it was alive, and the candles walked off by themselves.

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.

She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again.

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

... civilization—a word that simply means "living in cities..."Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consulta

The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding con

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

We no longer produce laborers, we would rather pray to God to send laborers to come and build our cities

A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city will someday make.

Different cities visit us daily, they exist in the clouds.

In his mind, the city, as it awoke from its slumber, seemed to be built on quicksand. The stability was illusory.

If we act in clean way, we shall clear the city of any dirt.

She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that chil

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood.

Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass.

Oh you dear companionsElectric bells of the stations song of the reapersButcher's sleigh regiment of unnumbered streetsCavalry of bridges nights livid with alcoholThe cities I've seen lived like mad women(The Voyager)

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.

In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd, driving a tinkling flock along the walls."Man blessed by heaven," he asked me, stopping, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?""May the gods accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognise the illustrious city of Cecilia?""Bear with me," that man answered. "I am a wandering herdsman. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through cities; but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the gr

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...

...Americans didn’t stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixt

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.

I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts

A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.

When we can't get away for a vacation we get the same feeling by staying home and tipping every person that smiles.

One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country the American dollar will fall like a stone.

The trouble with all these other countries is they're all being run by foreigners.

My wife loves Europe but to me it's a bad day at a theme park.

This summer one-third of the nation will be ill-housed ill-nourished and ill-clad. Only they call it a vacation.

My wife tells me she doesn't care what I do when I'm away as long as I'm not enjoying it.

On cable TV they have a weather channel - twenty-four hours of weather. We had something like that where I grew up. We called it a window.

There's a lot of nice things about Denver. I just don't for the life of me know what they are.

The people of Seattle deny they get much rain while the rest of the country thinks of it as America's bladder.

Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.

The tanned appearance of many New Englanders is not sunburn - it is rust.

I hate Billings Montana. They have a fashion show at Sears Roebuck - no models. You open a catalog and point.

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.

L.A.'s large convenience stores are so big they can accommodate up to twenty armed robbers at one time.

After years of mocking L.A. for its smog the people of Denver are now coughing out of the other side of their mouths.

There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

It looks as if Hollywood brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.

It is possible to live in San Francisco for $35 000 a year. Obviously that doesn't include food or lodging.

L.A. bumper sticker: Keep honking - I'm reloading.

Miami bumper sticker: My horn is broken-so watch for my finger.

Miami drivers will attempt to pass you inside a car wash.

I lived in Miami for a while in a section with a lot of really old people. The average age in my apartment house was dead.

I have no respect for gangs today. None. They just drive by and shoot people. At least in the old days like in West Side Story the gangs used to dance with each other.

A car is useless in New York essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

I feel about New York as a child whose father is a bank robber. Not perfect but I still love him.

New Yorkers are so impersonal if it wasn't for muggings there wouldn't be any contact at all!

Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired you've had a headache since you arrived but you can't leave because then you'd miss the party.

Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spend in New York.

I have just returned from Boston it is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there.

A small town is usually divided by a railroad a main street two churches and a lot of opinions.

texan starting eternity: I never dreamed heaven would be so much like Texas. companion: Who said this was heaven?

Flying from the U.S. to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school.

I would say that the single most important conclusion I reached after traveling through Japan as well as countless hours reading studying and analyzing this fascinating culture is that you should always tighten the cap on the shampoo bottle before you put it in your suitcase.

I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong and he said: "Yes: the little one does."

France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.

How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Good Americans when they die go to Paris.

My father never lived to see his dream come true of an all-Yiddish-speaking Canada.

London: A place you go to get bronchitis.

Take a perfect day add six hours of rain and fog and you have instant London.

Always remember that you are an Englishman and therefore have drawn first prize in the lottery of life.

I once saw a pin on a Delta Airlines employee and I asked him what the letters in Delta stand for. He said "Don't Expect Luggage To Arrive."

When people ask me if I have any spare change I tell them I have it at home in my spare wallet.

When I first came to this country I didn't have a nickel in my pocket - now I have a nickel in my pocket.

Thank God we're living in a country where the sky's the limit the stores are open late and thanks to television you can shop in bed.

I love the polite drivers in La Jolla. At an intersection . . . most expensive car goes first.

We had a very successful trip to Russia we got back.

There is nothing safer than flying - it's crashing that is dangerous.

I would love to speak a foreign language but I can't. So I grew hair under my arms instead.

Chicago was started by a bunch of New Yorkers who said "Gee I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty but it just isn't cold enough."

Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.

Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. The