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“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
― Jane Jacobs

“A girl without braids
is like a city without bridges.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“The clothes you're wearing, the room, the house, the city that you're in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there's nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.”
― Alan Moore, Promethea, Vol. 5

“How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.”
― Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

“Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.

And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“With its population made up of two categories of people, those who do business and those upon whom they prey, the city has only a painful life to offer the young person who goes there to learn and to study; for sooner or later anyone who lives there, whatever his constitution, becomes disturbed and is eventually deranged and destroyed by the city, often in the most deadly and insidious manner.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

“I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.”
― Sheridan Hay, The Secret of Lost Things

“I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.”
― Tracey Emin, Strangeland

“The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass.”
― George Selden, The Cricket in Times Square

“There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall.

Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in any normal, chronological sequence. My only excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal - and yet so bizarrely representative - it was like something unreal; an occasionally macabre Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real world (and the realpolitik world), so much a crystallization of everything these people had managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history that it defiantly transcended everything it exemplified, and took on a single - if multifariously faceted - meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement no city in its right mind would want or be able to arrive at.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“For when man is faced with a curse he answers, "I'll take care of my problems." And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse.”
― Jacques Ellul, Meaning of the City

“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.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist.
Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter.
Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?”
― Tad Williams, The Dirty Streets of Heaven

“Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.”
― Sheridan Hay, The Secret of Lost Things

“Once arrived in the City, he dispersed utterly and gratefully in it like a raindrop fallen into the sea.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.”
― Rodney Stark

“Cities were once rural and one day they will turn to be rural again.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stations

We crossed cities that turn-tabled all day

And vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")”
― Pierre Albert-Birot, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

“Love and cities are always inextricably entwined. There's no restaurant or corner store or run-down dive in any city that doesn't double as a monument for a lost love. I think that's why we always stop and stare whenever we come across a girl crying in public. We sense the imprint of a memory being pressed onto the sidewalk, onto the building contours, onto the names of the streets.”
― Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve

“...cities are murky places - hatching grounds for monsters...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Cities make people sick; they create living dead! Get away from the cities in every possible occasion! River does no harm to you; forest does no harm to you; wild flowers do no harm to you! When you are in nature, you are amongst the friends! Be clever, be in the nature!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“Oh you dear companions

Electric bells of the stations song of the reapers

Butcher's sleigh regiment of unnumbered streets

Cavalry of bridges nights livid with alcohol

The cities I've seen lived like mad women

(The Voyager)”
― Pierre Albert-Birot, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

“People who live in pale cities tragically understand how so much poor they are when they come across with the dazzling colors of the country fields!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“... civilization—a word that simply means "living in cities..."

Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.”
― Tom Standage

“Heights plummeted because of a little disaster called civilization. "Heights go way down when we go into state society," says Bogin. "When Egypt conquered the Nile area, the height of peasants fell dramatically. They moved from having access to a wide variety of foods to growing what the Egyptian state demanded. Their bones show lots of deficiencies in minerals and iron." The same stunting happened repeatedly throughout history. As late as the 1800s, male Cheyenne Indians, who hunted bison and collected berries, averaged a whopping 5'10", towering above even today's Americans, not to mention General Custer's cavalry, which averaged 5'7", and the period's wealthy European monarchies.”
― Arianne Cohen, The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life from on High