City quotes

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◆ 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.

- Roman Payne100

◆ 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.

- Alexander McCall Smith99

◆ Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.

- Samuel R. Delany99

◆ Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

- Neil Gaiman99

◆ What I struggle with is that every thing excites me, cities, supermarkets, roads, dirt, rubbish, car parks, advertising, people, deforestation, excavation, fires, floods and violence. All of these things can be beautiful, yet I see the damage; the pain the obscenity of everything. When I am in the city, I long for the country the open space around me, yet in the city I enjoy all that goes on around me.

- Teo Ormond-Skeaping99

◆ To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

- Michel de Certeau99

◆ Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

- Truman Capote99

◆ It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.

- Michel de Certeau99

◆ How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That's what things look like in our cities at present

- Robert Walser99

◆ There have been times I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.

- Daniel Amory99

◆ Os sentimentos mais genuinamente humanos logo se desumanizam na cidade.

- E?a de Queirós99

◆ Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.

- Teju Cole99

◆ One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.

- Julia Gregson99

◆ This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.

- Maggie Stiefvater99

◆ One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What's the point?' he said. ‘Kids aren't getting jobs.' You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.

- Daniel Amory99