Best 73 quotes in «city life quotes» category

Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.

Like most cities, London could be a lonely place...

Oamenii mergeau pe străzile pietruite, aducând cartierul la viață pentru încă o zi.

Now everything is done by machines, technology has relieved you of much work. What to do? You become aggressive, you fight, you get angry. Without any reason or rhyme, you become angry – suddenly you flare up. Everybody knows that this is foolish, even you in your cooler moments know that that was foolish. But why did you flare up unnecessarily? The excuse was not enough. The real reason is not that there was some situation; the real reason is you have so much energy, so much petrol overflowing, inflammable, that any moment it can be active. That is why after anger you feel relaxed, after anger you feel a little well-being coming to you.

Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

One morning, the moon still high in the sky, Peri watched from her window a female student -- wearing earphones, her cheeks flushed -- running through the quad. She herself had tried it a few times back in Istanbul, despite the obstacles the city peppered along her trail. Here it was a privilege, of sorts, not to have to worry about broken pavements, potholes in the roads, sexual harassment, cars that did not slow down -- even at pedestrian crossings. The same day, she bought herself a pair of trainers.

Se nu er jeg borte fra byens larm og trængsel og aviser og mennesker, jeg er flygtet fra det altsammen fordi det igjen kaldte på mig fra landet og ensomheten hvor jeg er fra. Du skal se det kommer til å gå godt! Tænker jeg og har atter det bedste håp. Ak jeg har gjort en slik flugt før og er atter vendt tilbake til byen. Og atter flyktet.

Sa traiesti intr-o cusca cu cinci etaje, unde se umbla si se bocane deasupra capului tau, iar radioul urla din toate partile - e considerat un lucru tare bun. Iar sa traiesti ca un lucrator harnic al pamantului, intr-o bojdeuca lipita cu lut, la marginea stepei - se considera o mare nesansa.

Sometime we forget to value the small things, that inspire us more than the large! We should learn from daily than planning stupid future.

[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.

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.

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.

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.

Streets are like children, David thought; the small ones go to bed first.

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

The bald girl is emblematic of the problem. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women - you're tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't.

The bald girl i emblematic of the problem. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women - you're tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't.

The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then—revealing—just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason.

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control.

The city was alive, and so was he...

The energy of the town threatened to suck me into it, and realized how much weaker I was than before. Everyone has trouble living. I know that. But the present me is nearly powerless in this city.

The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square.

The process of categorisation is as old as men, yet as old as man alone, for no other animal species categorises itself so neatly. Yet the ultimate, most vulnerable and weakest victim of categorisation is empathy. Categorisation is a process that destroys the very empathy that enlivens communities: the empathy that traditionally binds diverse communities together.

Städte lassen sich an ihrem Gang erkennen wie Menschen.

...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating.

There are so many simple things getting unnoticed in me, it makes me feel I am a robot!

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.

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? Pg 290

To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour. From where the Celestial Gaze is situated, from that high above, all these sporadically lit bulbs must seem in perfect harmony, constantly flickering, as if coding a cryptic message to God.

When we build a city, we take our grandest dreams as well as our deepest anxieties and set them in concrete for the next generation.

Whenever we have fifteen free minutes, an hour or two, we have the habit of using our computers or cell phones, music, or conversations to forget and to run away from the reality of the elements that make up our beings.

We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.

When gangs took over the [abandoned public land in Philadelphia] and the neighborhood took a turn for the worse, horses became a way of saving lives. By getting boys interested in raising a horse rather than killing another human being, these cowboys gave the youth something positive: father figures, focus, and the ability to stand tall.

When we practice walking with awareness, our solid peaceful steps cultivate the energy of mindfulness and bring us back to the present moment. When we sit and follow our breathing, aware of our in-breath and out-breath, we are cultivating the energy of mindfulness. When we have a meal in mindfulness, we invest all our being in the present moment and are aware of our food and of those who are eating with us. We can cultivate the energy of mindfulness, whatever we are doing—when we are working, or cleaning up, and even when we are being intimate with our loved one. Just a few days practicing like this can increase our energy of mindfulness, and that energy will help us, protect us, and give us courage to go back to ourselves, to see and embrace what is there in our territory.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over a business card that read YOUR OWN PERSONAL TRANSHUMAN SECURITY WHORE! STERILIZED INNARDS! ACCEPTS ALL CREDIT CARDS to a large man who had trained attack cancers on his face and possessed seventy-five indentured Komodo Dragons instead of legs. And they had sex. Right in front of me. And six of the Komodo Dragons spat napalm on my new shoes.

You’re still way back in the past … I’m not here to argue with you over the merits and demerits of village life. But I’d tell you one thing: village people have more time in their hands to play with than you that is constrained with the hassles of the life in the city. They have the gadgets you don’t even have and they have more time watching more number of videos than people in the city. So you’d be surprised more village girls these days know a lot more than those in the cities.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal.

A city is a right place to build a business but not a right place to build a home.

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.

City life can manufacture depression with no expiry date

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

A city has no sense, no sentiment, no soul.

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time