City Life

Sunday, July 19, 2009 – City Life

When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it. ~ Hugh Newell Jacobsen

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. ~ Andy Warhol

Los Angeles is a large city-like area surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel. ~ Fran Lebowitz

In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings. ~ Delia Ephron

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. ~ Samuel Johnson

I’m leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it’s not raining. ~ Groucho Marx

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. ~ Peter Shaffer

If, in New York, you arrive late for an appointment, say, “I took a taxi.” ~ Andre Maurois

A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls – whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise. ~ Mark Helprin

The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags. ~ Henry Miller

New York now leads the world’s great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn’t make a sudden move. ~ David Letterman

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city. ~ Lewis Mumford

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There’s shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That’s why I pay no mind. ~ Beck Hansen

New York, the nation’s thyroid gland. ~ Christopher Morley

Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss -a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye. ~ E. B. White

If you’re not in New York, you’re camping out. ~ Thomas E. Dewey

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. ~ Thomas Wolfe

There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect’s wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. ~ Chief Seattle

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it. ~ Neil Simon

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles. ~ George Santayana

Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail. ~ H. L. Mencken

I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago… I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Washington DC is to lying what Wisconsin is to cheese. ~ Dennis Miller

Cities are the abyss of the human species. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch. ~ Christopher Fieldes

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday. ~ W. C. Fields

North Carolina is the place you fly over on the way to Florida. Ohio is the flat place between Hoboken and Malibu. ~ John Fleischman

I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey). ~ Bill Kraus

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. ~ Cyril Connolly

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality. ~ Jane Austen

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest. ~ Walter Benjamin

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman. ~ John Berger

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief… Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there. ~ Oscar Wilde

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. ~ Toni Morrison, Jazz