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City Life Quotes

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City Life Quotes

“Still he considered playing Pachinko the best investment of his free time, soaking in the local stench and bad breathe of other lonely Japanese people as an alternative way of blending into the colorful local scenes which he yearned to be a part of.”

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Book:The White Man and the Pachinko Girl
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“During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.”

RaceSouthAfrican AmericansBlacksGhettoCity LifeUrban LifeNorthGreat Migration
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds.”

LondonAmbiguityCity LifeMetropolisSoho
Book:Unnatural Causes
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“To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?”

LifeWorkCitiesLivingCity LifeSystemsCommutingRhythms
Book:Severance
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“আরম্ভের গান হ্যাঁ তোমাকে অনুমতি দেয়া হল তুমি যাও হ্যাঁ তুমি জ্যোতির্ময় গরিমা দেয়া হল হলে অকাট্য তুমি যেমন তুমি তেমন দাঁড়িয়ে তোমার মতন হাঁটো হ্যাঁ তোমাকে ক্ষমা করা হল তোমাকে ভালোবাসা হল আর আলিঙ্গন করা হল হ্যাঁ তোমাকে বলে হবে অসাধারণ যেমন ভাবে দাঁড়িয়ে থাকবে আর সহজ ভাবে বসে থাকবে হ্যাঁ তুমি আরম্ভ করো এইভাবে একটা ছোটো পদক্ষেপ এই পদক্ষেপ দোনামনা বিস্ময়কর যেমন পর্ণ ফার্ন গাছের বাতাসে তারপর কোমল আগাছা আরেক পদক্ষেপ যতোক্ষণ না শ্যাওলা আর তারপর হ্যাঁ তুমি ওখানে বৃষ্টিতে দৌড়োচ্ছো আলোর হাওয়া পাতাগুলো সবই মুখগুলো শেষ পর্যন্ত বন্ধুদের ও হ্যাঁ হ্যাঁ তোমায় দেখতে এতো সুন্দর যে তুমি হাঁটছো যেমন দৌড়োও ওড়ো ভেতরে আসো না বাতাস পাতাগুলো জ্যোতির্ময় সূর্য আর তোমার মুখ ও শোনো সবই হ্যাঁ শেষ পর্যন্ত”

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Book:Zebras
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“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.”

LifeCitiesLondonCity LifeMetropolis
Book:The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The Authoritative and Definitive Edition
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“It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.”

LifeCitiesHistoryLondonRenewalCity LifeMetropolisCircle Of LifeFictional LondonLiterary London
Book:Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
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“Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there. Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller. Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started there for a reason and then couldn't imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it. Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you came up with not much.”

LoveLifeSexWorkCitiesPlansGoalsDrugsCity LifeMetropolisUrban LifeMetropolisesUrban Fabric
Book:Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City
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“There was more to the city than he'd thought at first, especially once he got away from the circular communities mimicking villages. Young people joyriding the gondola lines, elders playing slow games of skill, an entire community brewing various kinds of sweet alcohol. He discovered more recreational drugs than he'd expected, but because this was Tatian, they seemed to have few negative consequences and leave people mostly happy and calm. Yet he couldn't bring himself to even consider participating in any of it, not for long. Even though he'd had forty years to come to terms with the death of his old friends, their ghosts returned to him. Brigana would have convinced him to take a break, Khaluu would have proven surprisingly knowledgeable about hallucinogens, and Eratius would have resisted at first but eventually joined them.”

HumorFriendshipMemoriesGriefTraumaCity LifeSoma
Book:Soulhome
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“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”

CitiesBridgesClimbingChicagoAbandonedTicketsCity LifeHotelsGreyhound
Book:Never Come Morning
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“Vivian’s first impression of Solidago was that she had travelled back in time, but not to a time where architecture had been invented. All houses were twisted out of shape, to say the least. Windows either too large to open or too small to make a difference peppered the city in places one would never dream of having one. The walls were mostly cast in brickwork by the kind of stonemason whose day job was financial advising. Skewed walls with more bricks than mortar, knotted chimneys keeping the smoke inside and cupping rooftops whose main purpose was to gather rainwater – Solidago had it all and more. As the oldest civilization of the cosmos, Alarians might have been excellent at healing, philosophizing and weaving into the fabric of reality, but they were very poor city builders.”

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Book:The Weaver of Odds
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“Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which -- or, rather, all the more because -- here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here. Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself.”

LonelinessTiesCity LifeNormalityTokyoOutsiderReclaimCoffee Shops
Book:Dance Dance Dance
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“To say it's the poor quality of the paint under socialism is correct, but it is not enough. To say it's soft-coal exploitation and air pollution, bad gasoline and bad cars, or lack of money - that again would be correct. But not the whole story. All these reasons (and probably many more) are not enough to explain the decrepitude. I think the reason is in us. The cities have been killed by our decades of indifference, by our conviction that somebody else - the government, the party, those 'above' - is in charge of it. Not us. How can it be us, if we are not in charge of our own lives?”

CitiesResponsibilityPaintSocialismCommunismDecayCity LifeUrban DecayCommonsEnvironmental Psychology
Book:How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
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“He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slip-stream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in. There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon night. So many ways to live. And to die. You could be riding in the back of a studio's black limo, or just as easily the back of the coroner's blue van. The sound of applause was the same as the buzz of a bullet spinning past your ear in the dark. That randomness. That was L.A. There was flash fire and flash flood, earthquake, mudslide. There was the drive-by shooter and the crack-stoked burglar. The drunk driver and the always curving road ahead. There were killer cops and cop killers. There was the husband of the woman you were sleeping with. And there was the woman. At any moment on any night there were people being raped, violated, maimed. Murdered and loved. There was always a baby at his mother's breast. And, sometimes, a baby alone in a Dumpster. Somewhere.”

RealityNightDarknessFateLonelinessAtmosphereLife And DeathCity LifeRandomnessUrban Noir
Book:The Black Ice
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“Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.”

HumansSidesWealthCitiesStreetsFashionMastersFlowRiversSlaveWaveCurrentsBroadsTidesRestlessCity LifeEbb And FlowIdlersCities At Night
Book:The Works of Whittier, Volume III (of VII) Anti-Slavery Poems and Songs of Labor and Reform
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“Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars and drinking soda popon stoops, and have passed a judgment, the gist of which is: "This is deplorable! If these people had decent homes and a more private or bosky outdoor place, they wouldn't be on the street!" That judgment represents a profound misunderstanding of cities. It makes no more sense than to drop in at a testimonial banquet in a hotel and conclude that if these people had wives who could cook, they would give their parties at home.”

PeopleIfsGivingLongHomePartyCitiesWifeStreetsJudgmentDrinkingProfoundBusyCornersStoresBarsCooksDecentHotelCandyMisunderstandingCity LifeReformersStoopsSodaBanquetsHanging AroundStreet LifeGistTestimonialCandy Stores
Book:The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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