City Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The priestess of Artemis took hold of her almost with the violence of a lover, and whisked her away into a languid ecstasy of reverie. She communicated her own enthusiasm to the girl, and kept her mind occupied with dreams, faery-fervid, of uncharted seas of glory on which her galleon might sail, undiscovered countries of spice and sweetness, Eldorado and Utopia and the City of God.

Aleister Crowley

In Rome you long for the country; in the country— oh inconstant! —you praise the distant city to the stars.

There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all.

I live in a city. I know sparrows from starlings. After that everything's a duck as far as I'm concerned.

Terry Pratchett

Lia: "You've changed your mind about wanting to marry me. You're afraid I'll burn down your home. Embarrass you in front of all the other city brutes." Zane: "I'm afraid," he said gently, "that you will burn down my heart.

King, tried in fires of woe!
Men hunger for thy grace:
And through the night I go,
Loving thy mournful face. Yet, when the city sleeps;
When all the cries are still:
The stars and heavenly deeps
Work out a perfect will.

No better evidence can be found of the extensive operations which have been carried on in this the greatest mining district of Northern Mexico, than in the little mountains of scoria [dregs] which are found in the suburbs of the city. A great number of poor laborers make a regular business of hammering to pieces these metallic excrescences, from which they collect silver enough to buy their daily bread.

He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent If we had ten thousand billion years.

New York City is not for the faint of heart. For one thing, it is a very expensive place to live. The price for every single activity — whether it's sending your child to nursery school or buying a cappuccino or parking in a garage — is $11,000.

I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930. I accepted segregation as a way of life. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.

James J. Kilpatrick

A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness

Boris Johnson has real contempt for Londoners. He hates that we celebrate each other's heritage; he hates that we try to pass on a healthy environment to our children; he hates that we look after our most vulnerable neighbours; and most of all he hates that we all expect to share in our city's financial success.

There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all.

Cecil Frances Alexander

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

I learned quickly that trying to force Country Folk to love the Big City is like telling your gay cousin, "You just haven't met the right girl yet.

Friday. Five o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city. Or, maybe the easiest. Because at five o'clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything. Except the road ahead.

No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.

Ursula K. Le Guin

His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City's genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.

Robert Charles Wilson

Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times.... Boston University, where I did my Master's … most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors.

Neal Stephenson

I walk along the city streets you used to walk along with me,
And every step I take recalls how much in love we used to be.
Oh, how can I forget you?
When there is always something there to remind me

I guess I was seeking some balance in the wildlife of the city as Rachel Carson sought it in nature. In unbalanced times, balance is as difficult to come by as Parsifal's Grail.

There is a fine sense of freedom that comes from wandering about a familiar city with no particular destination in mind, with no one to meet, no duties, no obligations. I had nothing to do and a thousand nameless, sun-drenched streets to do it in.

Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt.

William Winwood Reade

I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs.

Bret Easton Ellis