#City Life Quotes

“But now behold,In the quick forge and working-house of thought,How London doth pour out her citizens!”

“I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.”

“The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.”

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”

“Walking through a crowd, the village is aglow. Kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats, under coats. Everybody here wanted something more. Searching for a sound we hadn't heard before. And it said, 'Welcome to New York,' It's been waiting for you. It's a new soundtrack, I could dance to this beat forevermore. The lights are so bright, but they never blind me.”

“I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gaycapital [Paris].”

“Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.”

“New York traffic can drive you crazy.”

“But it is rather derogatory that your dwelling-place should be only a neighborhood to a great city,--to live on an inclined plane.I do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one's eye. I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy,--nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea,--and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived.”

“The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.”

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

“New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.”

“In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.”

“Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.”

“We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.”

“Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car.”

“It is an inconvenience, being located in a city where taxes are ludicrously high, where you pay twice your annual income to rent an apartment that could easily be carried on a commercial airline flight.”

“Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”