City sayings

Page 2

◆ There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon.

- Hubert Selby Jr.99

◆ If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

- Vera Nazarian99

◆ This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart's affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.

- Roman Payne99

◆ when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.

- William S. Burroughs99

◆ Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.

- Jeannette Walls99

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

- Chief Seattle99

◆ You can't understand a city without using its public transportation system.

- Erol Ozan99

◆ If there were such a thing as an inter-city thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone's wallets.

- Terry Pratchett99

◆ To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

- Michel de Certeau99

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

- Don DeLillo99

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

- Melina Marchetta99

◆ Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

- Nelson Algren99

◆ On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.

- Albert Camus99

◆ The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

- Italo Calvino99

◆ It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

- Christopher Fowler99