Cities Spaces Places Quotes

“Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

“Traffic's not too bad on Sheridan, and I'm cornering the car like it's the Indy 500, and we're listening to my favorite NMH song, "Holland, 1945," and then onto Lake Shore Drive, the waves of Lake Michigan crashing against the boulders by the Drive, the windows cracked to get the car to defrost, the dirty, bracing, cold air rushing in, and I love the way Chicago smells—Chicago is brackish lake water and soot and sweat and grease and I love it, and I love this song, and Tiny's saying I love this song, and he's got the visor down so he can muss up his hair a little more expertly.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance—romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Scientists estimate that the Siberian permafrost holds the remains of 150 million mammoths—or about 8 million more than the 142 million Russians aboveground in Russia today.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“On July 29, six days after I had arrived in Paris, Fin and I moved into the new lodgings on the top floor of the hotel next door, where, beyond the pigeons who occupied the window ledge, you could see the turrets of Notre Dame. The concierge told us not to feed the birds, but we gave them our stale bread just the same, and so our flock became a feathered multitude, pushing and shoving one another behind the cracked glass. In the afternoons the light seemed to have feathers in it.”
― Rebecca Stott, The Coral Thief

“We are far from liking London well enough till we like its defects: the dense darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons.
There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of children—the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday walk—in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the other.”
― Henry James, English Hours

“Our car is constantly in motion. It is raining in the streets we glide through, and this constitutes one more added pleasantness. Some people find it frightfully agreeable to see that it is raining and at the same time be permitted to sense that they themselves are not getting wet. The image produced by a gray, wet street has something consoling and dreamy about it, and so you stand now upon the rear platform of the creaking car that is rumbling its way forward, and you gaze straight ahead. Gazing straight ahead is something done by almost all the people who sit or stand in the "electric.”
― Robert Walser, Berlin Stories

“Every walk carves out a new city. And each of these tiny cities has its main square, a downtown area all its own, its own memorial statue, its own landmarks, laundromats, bus terminal—in short, its own focal point (from the Latin word focus, meaning fireplace, hearth, foyer, home), warm spot, sweet spot, soft spot, hot spot.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“And the space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed— provided you have the money.”
― Alessandro Busà, The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite

“There is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end, over which there breaks unrelentingly a shifting wave of laws. There is the city-jungle and the city where people live in the pillars of tall viaducts that crisscross each other in countless overpasses and underpasses, the city of sounds and nothing else, the city in the swamp, the city of smooth white balls rolling on concrete, the city comprising apartments spread across several continents, the city where sculptures fall endlessly from dark clouds and smash on the paving stones, the city where the moon’s path passes through the insides of apartments. All cities are mutually the center and periphery, beginning and end, capital and colony of each other.”
― Michal Ajvaz, The Other City

“Like most cities, London could be a lonely place...”
― Kassandra Cross, Sex with the CEO

“Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars.”
― Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk

“One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable—embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak?”
― Henry James, English Hours

“After a week's worth of failed fairy tales—stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut—my father tried telling me stories that belonged only to him. Thomas told me of an island off the coast of a different world. On this island, there stood a city whose buildings were made of glass. He told me that at the heart of this city was a forest with trees, ponds and a lake, swans and horses, and even a small castle. He told me that the streets of the city were filled with bright yellow cars that you hopped in and out of at will and that would take you wherever you wanted to go. In this city, there were sidewalks overflowing with people from the whole world over who wanted so much to be there. He told me of its neighborhoods, with names like Greenwich Village and Harlem and Chinatown. At the nucleus of these stories was my father, and spinning around him was the city of New York. Long before I would see them in photographs or in real life, my father had given me the white crown lights of the Chrysler Building and the shining needle of the Empire State.”
― Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth

“Paris is an ocean," a lawyer called Honoré said to me in a bar on the place Vendôme later that night. We were very drunk. "You can take as many soundings as you like, but you'll never reach the bottom of it. You can survey it, draw it, describe it. But, however thorough you are, however careful and scrupulous, something is always just beyond your reach. There will always be another unmapped cave, monsters, pearls, things undreamt of, overlooked by everyone else.”
― Rebecca Stott

“Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark.”
― Jo Walton, Half a Crown

“There is no better cure for a poor city dweller who is spiritually devastated among the soulless concrete than to go to the countryside and dive into the lush grass!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“And probably every object that we make room for in our life immediately structures that life—the important thing, don't you agree, is to actually acknowledge and experience this fact.”
― Daniël Robberechts, Arriving in Avignon

“We would meet outside the same wine bar we had gone to on our first date, and from there we would wander through the city for five or six hours since neither one of us had a private place that we could retreat to. Walking out in the open for so long only helped to draw us closer. There was too much space on the avenues, and the side streets were often too crowded with people and cabs hurrying to cut across town. To counter that we held each other's hands and arms, ribs and waists.”
― Dinaw Mengestu, How to Read the Air

“I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens.”
― Scarlett Thomas, Our Tragic Universe

“There was that all-pervasive evening scent of cut grass and jasmine.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“Get off the Expressway, and go south a mile or so, or half a mile north toward the Zoo; drive in and out through streets whose names are posted at the soul’s intersections — Fox, Kelly, Longwood, Honeywell, Southern Boulevard — and you will find blocks that feel so much like blocks you left long ago, blocks you thought had vanished forever, that you will wonder if you are seeing ghosts or if you yourself are a ghost haunting these solid streets with the phantoms of your inner city.”
― Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity

“Jesus Christ lives in all people. We are citizens of one world.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Electronic virtual communities represent flexible, lively, and practical adaptations to the real circumstances that confront persons seeking community ... They are part of a range of innovative solutions to the drive for sociality--a drive that can be frequently thwarted by the geographical and cultural realities of cities increasingly structured according to the needs of powerful economic interests rather than in ways that encourage and facilitate habitation and social interaction in the urban context. In this context, electronic virtual communities are complex and ingenious strategies for survival.”
― Allucquère Rosanne Stone

“Streets are like children, David thought; the small ones go to bed first.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“...most of the parade's attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county's small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who'd made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“While you are running from one place to another in the big city, you feel that your life is running away from you, because in a sense, life is time!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan