Cities - City Quotes

In the big city, if the man next door happens to be a slum landlord, a Mafia bag man, or a long distance runner, what does it matter, as long as he puts his garbage out on Tuesdays?

New York, the hussy, was taken in sin again!

At nine in the morning, the aforementioned “Twentieth Century Limited” arrived in Chicago. For a while before that, however, one passes through parts of the city so hideous that one wonders how living creatures can vegetate there. The never-ending drizzle, armed with the entire American array of cars, lights, advertisements, life, and traffic, fought a […]

Metropolis, n. A stronghold of provincialism.

Cities are full of people with whom… a certain degree of contact is useful; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either.

Being asked by a young nobleman, what was become of the gallantry and military spirit of the old English nobility, (Johnson) replied, “Why, my Lord, I’ll tell you what is become of it; it is gone into the city to look for a fortune.”

A transition from an author’s book to his conversation is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendor, grandeur, and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it […]

Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, A rose-red city “half as old as Time!”

Where the vast cloudless sky was broken by one crow I sat upon a hill – all alone – long ago; But I never felt so lonely and so out of God’s way, As here, where I brush elbows with a thousand every day.

What is London? Clean, commodious, neat; but, a very few things indeed excepted, an endless addition of littleness to littleness, extending itself over a great tract of land.