City Quotes - Page 4

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

The principles of godliness must be ensured to be received by all in the community, city and the nation, even by the young and old.

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.

He needed to get away from the rush of the city, from the unceasing noise and annoying obligations.

The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments

Every inch of space was used. As the road narrowed, signs receded upwards and changed to the vertical. Businesses simply soared from ground level and hung out vaster, more fascinatingly illuminated shingles than competitors. We were still in a traffic tangle, but now the road curved. Shops crowded the pavements and became homelier. Vegetables, spices, grocery produce in boxes or hanging from shop lintels, meats adangle - as always, my ultimate ghastliness - and here and there among the crowds the alarming spectacle of an armed Sikh, shotgun aslant, casually sitting at a bank entrance. And markets everywhere. To the right, cramped streets sloped down to the harbor. To the left, as we meandered along the tramlines through sudden dense markets of hawkers' barrows, the streets turned abruptly into flights of steps careering upwards into a bluish mist of domestic smoke, clouds of washing on poles, and climbing. Hong Kong had the knack of building where others wouldn't dare.

I came to this city to escape.

The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul's, he tripped and fell over a piece of rubble -- a tombstone. When he got to his feet and dusted himself down he saw that it read, in Latin, 'Resurgam' -- 'I Will Rise Again.

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

Every city, every town, hides beneath a certain amount of glamour that- either intentionally or not- can misdirect the eye or hide something worth finding. Learning to see through those glamours is part of the process of calling any place home.

This poor little one-horse town.

I like to visit New York but I wouldn't live there if you gave it to me.

The city was different back then--poor and crumbling--kept alive only by the gritty determination and steely cynicism of its occupants. But underneath the dirt was the apple-cheeked optimism of possibility, and while she worked, the whole city seemed to throb along with her.

They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles.

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?” asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air. My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, “Disgusting cardboard it is!

It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are beautifully shaped, like a new church, like modern architecture, like a planned city

I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.

Never follow the crowd....Until and unless you're crossing the road...

There's organized confusion on African roads while driving in the cities. If you want to mess up Afican Cities very easy, just fly in 100 Americans put them on the road and tell them to drive.

This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.

Before them is the most beautiful city she has ever seen, has ever imagined. Golden rooftops shine brightly; windows made from diamonds and rubies gleam; tall buildings reach toward the clouds. She is again overwhelmed, this time with gratitude. All this, for her.

...the assessment of psychological drift, that is the way in which an undirected pedestrian tends to move about in a particular quarter of the town, tending to establish natural connections between places, the zones of influence of particular institutions and public services, and so forth. It may well be objected that these techniques are un-scientific, disorderly and too subjective, but the fact remains that the Situationists are studying the actual texture of towns and their relationship to human beings more intensively than most architects and in a more down-to-pavement manner than most town planners.

Look, girls know when they’re cute,” he said. “You don’t have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn’t have a job. I was like, ‘How are you going to get a job there in this market?’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll wink and I’ll smile.’ She’s a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.

What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.

Is your life really so bad? This city is full of opportunities –”“Can you call it a city?” Marcus asked. “No gymnasium, no theatre, no forum? Where is the life a Roman man should lead?

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..

@K11, Urban farming; It’s something nice and warm for families and kids, but also references elements of the city. Urban Farming is very important for Shanghainese people because the city has lost its connection with nature. When you buy fruit or vegetables it’s just that - a product - for kids and us, we wanted to reconnect this with the amazing process of growing plants. People need this, urban farming connects people with their roots. In this way it’s also educational

Stop worrying about missed opportunities and start looking for new ones.

We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.)

You have a responsibility to keep your homes, surroundings and city clean.

A bus drives past and I’m nauseated by a whiff of exhaust. Then rotting fish. The rancid stench of sewage. Is it garbage day? I’m trapped in the pungent fog, in the dreary suburban-style shops, the rat race of city life. The city, even on the west coast, has the power to beat us down, to suck us of passion, to crush our dreams.

I will not see you, she tells the city, but I will remember you.

Since its sudden birth the city had expanded, swallowing up acre upon acre of the surrounding grasslands and drawing thousands into its domain. Hardly built on the most advantageous ground, miles from the open waters, decades from the mines at the mountain summits, it yet remained the only settlement of note on the isle. This sprawling mass of a city, once a compact kingdom, was now the keystone of the Castilian Empire.

Who said Hong Kong too small? In size perhaps but not in it`s soul and personality. Every corner in this city giving you full of surprises, if not every hour but at least every day….

All he really knew was that if he stayed here he would soon be the property of things that buzzed and snorted and hissed, that gave off fumes or stenches. In six months, he would be the owner of a large pink, trained ulcer, a blood pressure of algebraic dimensions, a myopia this side of blindness, and nightmares as deep as oceans and infested with improbable lengths of dream intestines through which he must violently force his way each night.

My visage high above your city,Shines like gold, but half as pretty.Arms I've none, but hands I've two:Mondo, mini, black not blue.Climb my stairs and have no fears, All that threatens are my gears.Tucked beneath the mightly wheel,An envelpe shall truth reveal.

City of Wizards is normally quite a GOOD thing, since only Good WIZARDS seem able to live together. . . .There have been cities of EVIL Wizards in the past. You will occasionally come across the sites of these, reduced to a glassy slag during the ultimate disagreement.

I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.

Really, nobody was there?” I asked.“Well, nobody important,” he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking.

Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.

New York had saved him, in a very real way. It had pushed and prodded him with its impatient and sharp fingers, reminding him on a daily basis during that jittery first year that it didn't really give a goddamn whether he sank or swam. He liked its selfishness and its generosity and its propensity for flipping the bird to the rest of the world.

Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, defecate.

I would describe the distinction between city and landscape like this: cities tend to excite and agitate me; they make me feel big or small, self-confident, proud, curious, excited, tense, annoyed... or they intimidate me. But the landscape, if I give it the chance, offers me freedom and serenity. Nature has a different sense of time. Time is big in the landscape while in the city it is condensed, just like the city's space.

Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.

Ah, what sights and sounds and pain lie beneath that mist. And we had thought that our hard climb out of that cruel valley led to some cool, green and peaceful, sunlit place---but it's all jungle here, a wild and savage wilderness that's overrun with ruins. But put on your crown, my Queen, and we will build a New City on these ruins.

The City is free of sinThe snow has given it absolution A man who slips A horse that fallsOh no, the city is in a nightgown

If you would be known and not know vegetate in a village if you would know and not be known live in a city.

Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of utility and necessity that, according to their beliefs, should be the basis for the construction of any object created by humanity become immediately absurd once we analyze all the object being manufactured today. A fork or a bed cannot come to be considered necessary for humanity's life and health, and yet retain a relative value.They are 'learned necessities.' Modern human beings are suffocating under necessities like televisions, refrigerators, etc. And in the process making it impossible to live their real lives. Obviously we are not against modern technology, but we are against any notion of the absolute necessity of objects, to the point even of doubting their real utility.'Asger Jorn

I belong here, I tell Toy. I'm hungry for every city block. Every brick building. Every crowded intersection. Electric. I feel brand new.

City people. They may know how to street fight but they don't know how to wade through manure.

I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.

This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

My dear, you are not one person. You have many people in you, and each one can ask only some kinds of questions.

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.

The ride had begun.The theatre and club spectaculars seemed to stick up into the sky at all sorts of crazy angles, probably because most of them were planted diagonally on rooftops. Follow Thru, Whoopee, Show Boat, El Fay Club, Club Richman, Texas Guinan's. It gave the town the appearance of standing on its ear. ("The Number's Up")

I wish in the city of your heartyou would let me be the streetwhere you walk when you are mostyourself. I imagine the houses:It has been raining, but the rainis done and the children kept homehave begun opening their doors.

What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone.“That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.”He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.”“Reflections?” he asked quietly.“They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different.