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City Quotes

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City Quotes

“Valerie, I love you so much. I wanted you to have a normal childhood—so I lived a double life. Hiding in plain sight. Living modestly.” He began to pace the room, the words tumbling out of him. “I tried to keep it up, but I’ve been so disrespected. Even by my own wife. I couldn’t do it anymore. I’ve settled for far less than I deserved, and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I decided it was time to leave for the city....For richer hunting grounds.” Cesaire was snarling now, a scary, powerful force. Valerie felt herself being drawn to it.... She took a deep, steadying breath. It was not just fear that she felt. What she felt was so much more complex than that, something she couldn’t understand. “Then why didn’t you just go?” “Because I loved you girls, and I wanted you to come with me. To share the wealth.” “But you had to wait until the blood moon.”

FatherCityWolfMoreLeaveComeValerieBlood MoonCesaire
Book:Red Riding Hood Bonus Chapter
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“I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, But my heart was full of my new love's glory, My eyes were laughing and unafraid. I met one who had loved me madly And told his love for all to hear -- But we talked of a thousand things together, The past was buried too deep to fear. I met the other, whose love was given With never a kiss and scarcely a word - Oh, it was then the terror took me Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred. Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die - but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years… I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, My heart was full of my new love's glory, - But my eyes were suddenly afraid.”

LoveCityAfraidThe Ghost
Author:Sara Teasdale
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“You have a responsibility to keep your homes, surroundings and city clean.”

CitiesHealingEnvironmentWise WordsCitizensWisdom QuotesIllnessWise QuotesWorking TogetherInspiring QuotesHealthy LivingWork EthicLiving LifeCityCleanlinessFamous QuotesFamiliesEnvironmental ProtectionHealth And FitnessInspiring WordsEnvironmental ConservationEnvironmental DegradationResponsibilitiesHomesDisease PreventionDutiesResponsibility To ProtectEnvironmental ValuesIllness And HopeClean EnvironmentClean Surroundings
Book:Think Great: Be Great!
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“you and i belong to this city this city which we both love this city of stupa and chanting of temple and arati of church and hymn of masjid and namaz of gurudwara and gurbani this city of love and affection this city of culture and tradition this city reaching for a modern sky yet its roots deep and ancient! you and i belong to this city this city which we both love.”

LoveChurchTravelerLife And Living Life PhilosophyCityTempleSpreading LoveMasjidGurudwaraStupa
Author:Avijeet Das
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“Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors' graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch's Fingers, four long talons of sand that lay in the mouth of the river. Rumour had it that, on stormy nights a century ago, they used to reach out, gouge holes in passing ships, and drag them down. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried in that glistening silt. The city's black heart had beaten strongly even then. There was one funeral director, supposedly, who used to put lamps out on the Fingers and lure ships to their doom.”

LampsCityWrecksShipDoomededWitch S Fingers
Book:The Five Gates of Hell
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“Le chuintement des portes qui se referment masque mon salut au chauffeur, et le bus redémarre dans un sursaut poussif, sans plus s'attarder pour une fille oubliée sitôt descendue. Je reste immobile sur le trottoir. Quand le bus a disparu au loin, alors seulement je traverse et je rentre chez moi. Rugissements du vent d'Est Oiseaux de métal Sur les branches asphaltées”

LifePoetryBusCityMontrealPenséesVie Urbaine
Book:Les petits riens
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“When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.”

RainSeasonsIndiaTrainFogCityMumbaiMetropolitanCreative Nonfiction
Author:Sneha Subramanian Kanta
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“When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I have argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.”

SeasonsFogCityMumbaiMetropolitanCreative Nonfiction
Author:Sneha Subramanian Kanta
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“An age-old city is like a pond. With its colours and reflections. Its chills and murk. Its ferment, its sorcery, its hidden life. A city is like a woman, with a woman’s desires and dislikes. Her abandon and restraint. Her reserve - above all, her reserve. To get to the heart of a city, to learn its most subtle secrets, takes infinite tenderness, and patience sometimes to the point of despair. It calls for an artlessly delicate touch, a more or less unconditional love. Over centuries. Time works for those who place themselves beyond time. You’re no true Parisian, you do not know your city, if you haven’t experienced its ghosts. To become imbued with shades of grey, to blend into the drab obscurity of blind spots, to join the clammy crowd that emerges, or seeps, at certain times of day from the metros, railway stations, cinemas or churches, to feel a silent and distant brotherhood with the lonely wanderer, the dreamer in his shy solitude, the crank, the beggar, even the drunk - all this entails a long and difficult apprenticeship, a knowledge of people and places that only years of patient observation can confer.”

TimeParisCityPsychogeography
Author:Jacques Yonnet
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“You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity The most modern European is you Pope Pius X And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you From entering a church and confessing this morning You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines ("Zone")”

PoetryLanguageChurchEuropeWordsNewspapersAdvertisingProseConfessionCityModernityHeadlinesMysteriesMystery NovelsTextEuropeanBillboardCatalogsPope Pius X
Book:Zone
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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.”

ArchitectureFunny QuotesCityCity LifeVivian AmbervilleWeaver Of Odds
Book:The Weaver of Odds
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“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.”

IdentityWalkingCityNowhere103Pedestrianism
Book:The Practice of Everyday Life
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“Mosul, the native city of the historian Ibn al-Athir, was the capital of Jazira, or Mesopotamia, the fertile plain watered by the two great rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It was a political, cultural, and economic centre of prime importance. The Arabs boasted of its succulent fruit: its apples, pears, grapes, and pomegranates. The fine cloth it exported - called 'muslin', a word derived from the city's name - was known throughout the world. At the time of the arrival of the Franj, the people of the emir Karbuqa's realm were already exploiting another natural resource, which the traveller Ibn Jubayr was to describe with amazement a few dozen years later: deposits of naphtha. This precious dark liquid, which would one day make the fortune of this part of the world, already offered travellers an unforgettable spectacle.”

IraqCityMosul
Book:The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
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“I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else." "Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.”

DifferentCountryPainDesireValuesHurtSinCitiesVirtueHonestYouthStrangeTravelEssenceGreedArchitectureGoodLifestyleCrueltyInnocenceConstructionBadCityDifferenceQuestionRoadMeannessWhyCruelSameVoyageWay Of LifeTripCustomForeignForeignerSightsee
Book:Queen of Fire
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“I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.”

DreamSchoolFictionEconomyDreamsYouthAdventureSummerYoung AdultYaLawyerYoung Adult FictionChicagoJobCityAttorneyDowntownLaw Student
Book:Minor Snobs
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“Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness. ("Novelty")”

DreamsCity
Book:American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now
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