City Quotes

“Cautiously, she let her knuckles brush against his, a slight weight, a bird’s feather. He stiffened, but he didn’t pull away.

“I’m not ready to give up on this city, Kaz. I think it’s worth saving.” I think you’re worth saving.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“We lived in the Bull Court; a city sealed in a palace, and a life sealed in with death. Yet it is a proud city, and a strong fierce life. A man once in it is of it till he dies. So I, who have gray beginning in my beard, still say "it is", as if the Bull Court stood and I might yet go back to it.”
― Mary Renault, The King Must Die

“Edinburgh seduces with her ancient buildings. She pours alcohol or food down the throats of anyone passing, dangles her trinkets, leaves pockets bare. She's a pickpocket. The best kind of thief, one you think of - most fondly.”
― Jenni Fagan, Luckenbooth

“In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“A city becomes a world when one loves its inhabitants.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Will I gain anything by the change? It is still a city: this one happens to be cut in two by a river, the other one is by the sea, yet they look alike. One takes a piece of bare sterile earth and one rolls big hollow stones on to it. Odours are held captive in these stones, odours heavier than air. Sometimes people throw them out of the windows into the streets and they stay there until the wind breaks them apart. In clear weather, noises come in one end of the city and go out the other, after going through all the walls; at other times, the noises whirl around inside these sun-baked, ice-split stones.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“El habitante de las ciudades es lo que ven en él los ojos de los demás.”
― Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

“But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning -- the city inhaling -- or the same thorough-fares in the evening -- the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“I had come to this city because I wanted
to disappear into its amorphous multitudes of people who didn’t know me. I wanted to be seen only when I chose to be seen.
Cities allowed you that, they took you in like quicksand and spat you out if they found you indigestible.”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“Was this what I wanted, the rest of my days being laid out for me? A life not of my choosing. Would I be able to live it out here, in this isolation, six months on an island, the days unfolding one into another, a series of Russian dolls, diminishing in their intensity and diminishing me as well. Would I be diminished? Or was this what I needed, to live here undisturbed for the rest of my life and never have to interact with the fractiousness of city living ever again?”
― Kiran Manral, More Things in Heaven and Earth

“It almost felt as if Istanbul had become a blissful metropolis, romantically picturesque, just like Paris, thought Zeliha; not that she had ever been to Paris.”
― Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul

“What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“A haze of neon illuminates the network of streets far below, and the sound of the traffic is quieter this high up. Even so, I can just make out the fine-tuned engines of several ModBikes in the distance –electrons circling Descada’s corrupted nucleus.
It’s an impressive view for a dorm, one of the best I’ve seen. It’s really no small wonder why most kids don’t discuss anything existing beyond the city. You could almost believe the buildings and lights here go on forever. This is our sanctuary. All we’ve ever known.”
― Dekka Nye, The Dying of the Day

“Will I gain anything by the change? It is still a city: this one happens to be cut in two by a river, the other one is by the sea, yet they look alike. One takes a piece of bare sterile earth and one rolls big hollow stones on to it. Odours are held captive in these stones, odours heavier than air. Sometimes people throw them out of the windows into the streets and they stay there until the wind breaks them apart. In clear weather, noises come in one end of the city and go out the other, after going through all the walls; at other times, the noises whirl around inside these sun-baked, ice-split stones.”
― SARTRE J.P.

“There are certain cities and certain areas of certain cities where the official language is dreams. Venice is one. And Paris. North Beach in San Francisco. Wenceslaus Square in Prague. And New Orleans, the city that dreams stories. Writers come and eavesdrop and take some of those stories with them, but these are just a few drops from a Mississippi river of stories.”
― Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans Stories: Great Writers on the City

“show me the city
that does not mourn its fallen
whose pillars embrace
white coffins and freeze
time and distort space”
― Hanna Abi Akl, Correspondence

“everything seems difficult, until you change the ways and look at life from different angle”
― Jordan Hoechlin

“Because the locals are unfriendly, unfriendly by the standards of an unfriendly city in an unfriendly world, and the local guard know better than to waste their time trying to police the place, like a doctor knows better than to bandage a corpse.”
― Daniel Polansky

“It is important that USA healthcare workers realize that New York City is a 5G wireless radiation hot zone.”
― Steven Magee

“Dawn in the city arrives in slumber and a quiet tolerance, which lingers until an urban urgency takes delivery of the day.”
― Shawn P. McCarthy

“Being born in Mumbai, I inherited the syntax of its distinct vocabulary. The undulant range of people as vibrant as the thrum of the Arabian Sea, smells of mogra, gulab, and champa from Dadar market, and songs of fisherman as Marine Drive gleams with the first light of dawning.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“When I was a young girl, my parents often visited a temple from where the Arabian Sea was visible. I accompanied them only to look forward to the few moments where sea mist and a widening orb of space juxtaposed.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“At the back of the house, dogs imprisoned in small yards ran in circles. Telephone cables, electric wires, and clothes lines crossed and recrossed, giving the houses, light poles, and leafless trees the quality of a contour drawing, one continuous line.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I have argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Come and see what the world looks like at the Shanghai Tower, Shanghai, China.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“A familiar itch was creeping in. That aching towards something wild— when the days get longer and a walk through the city becomes entirely pleasant from morning to night, when you want to run drunk down an empty street in sneakers and fling all responsibility to the wayside.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Don’t become that church that has given up hope in the grace and mercy of God and stands there condemning your city because of its sinfulness.”
― Jurgen Matthesius