City Life Quotes

“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?”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“All those ants scurrying about like rats in a maze, going back and forth to the same few locations day after day, thinking the cheese they’re sniffing for will somehow magically appear on the routes they cover over and over again. They’re born into the programmed maze, so they can’t even conceive of a different way of life. Not only can’t they believe in a different way of life, but they’re programmed to scoff and ridicule the few freethinkers who do. After the ridiculing, they go back to their programming, pushing buttons and pulling levers for no reason. Ah, the good old rat race that never ends till cancer comes a knockin’.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“[Poem: Slates of Grey]

Sullen faces like slates of grey—
What I’d seen on a walk today.

Bodies rushing bodies bolting
Time for life a disregarding.

Money to make and to grow old
What about the hands to hold?

Deadlines, projects, people to meet
What about our own two feet.

Sullen faces like slates of grey...
What I’d see most anyday.”
― Jess C Scott, Trouble

“শ্যামবর্ণের রোগা ভাঙ্গা গালওয়ালা এই লোকটাকে ওসমান অনেকবার দেখেছে। কোথায়? এই বাড়ির সিঁড়িতে? তাই হবে। আরো অনেক জায়গায় এর সঙ্গে দ্যাখা হয়েছে। কোথায়? স্টেডিয়ামে? হতে পারে। গুলিস্তানের সামনে সিনেমার পোস্টার দেখতে দেখতে? হতে পারে। পল্টন ময়দানের মিটিংযে? হতে পারে। ভিক্টোরিয়া পার্কে? আরমানিটোলার মাঠের ধারে ? ঠাটারিবাজারের রাস্তার ধারে বসে শিককাবাব খেতে খেতে? হতে পারে। বলাকা সিনেমায় পাশাপাশি দাঁড়িয়ে পেচ্ছাব করতে করতে? হতে পারে। নবাবপুরে অনেক রাতে ঠেলাগাড়ির পাশে দাঁড়িয়ে হালিম খেতে খেতে? হতে পারে। আমজাদিয়ায় পাশের টেবিলে তর্ক করতে করতে? হতে পারে। মুখটা তার অনেকদিনের চেনা।”
― Akhteruzzaman Elias, চিলেকোঠার সেপাই

“...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.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“But you’re out of another world old kid … You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.”
― John Dos Passos

“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
― Frank O'Hara

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“I hear nothing but the hustle and bustle of the city. Cars with flashing lights zip past me. People talk, some loud, some quiet. I whisper to myself. “This is what it’s like to go unnoticed.” I take in a deep breath and inhale the freezing air. It smells like ice here. Ice and cigarettes.”
― Rachel Ellynn M., mind weaving

“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.”
― G. Neri, Ghetto Cowboy

“It required an enormous amount of energy and time just to do errands like getting groceries. She was always sweaty after she got groceries.”
― Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise

“Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.”
― Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise

“Both Calvin and Hobbes are sitting on a carpet, a "magic carpet." They're riding in the sky, among the clouds.

CALVIN:
Hey, let's fly into the city and buzz Dad's office.

CALVIN:
Ha! Won't he be surprised whenhe sees US out his 20th-floor window.

HOBBES:
What if he's mad that we took the hallway rug?

CALVIN:
What's to get mad about?" We wiped our feet first.

HOBBES:
Yeah, but all this city mileage may hurt the resale value.”
― Bill Watterson

“Nor was it mean delight
To watch crude Nature work in untaught minds;
To note the laws and progress of belief;
Though obstinate on this way, yet on that
How willingly we travel, and how far!
To have, for instance, brought upon the scene
The champion, Jack the Giant-killer: Lo!
He dons his coat of darkness; on the stage
Walks, and achieves his wonders, from the eye
Of living Mortal covert, "as the moon
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."
Delusion bold! and how can it be wrought?
The garb he wears is black as death, the word
"Invisible" flames forth upon his chest.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Lima exudes a distinct ambiance, akin to a heavy rain cloud casting darkness over everything. It is a challenging place, where life offers no respite and its inhabitants remain forever vigilant against adversity.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Days

“Cold buildings stand as we shiver within.”
― Devika Todi, Dreaming in A Fish Bowl

“Think of a fisherman fishing at dusk in the middle of a calm sea, and think of yourself amidst the unbearable noise of a terrible city crowd! Yes, that's right, how unlucky you are!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“we can probably, as a nation, loose all our birds, and there is an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice. as we become more urban, we’re loosing out attachment”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“we can probably, as a nation, loose all our birds, and there is an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice. as we become more urban, we’re loosing our attachment”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“She tries to lie still, but she's forgotten how. On the farm everything had been still. The silence was a complete thing. She could touch it with her fingers, taste it with her mouth, and sit in it like bathwater. Things took time on the farm; they gathered and grew. You sat and drank tea on the stoep and didn't think about whether it was day or night. But here she feels like being lived; outside the curtains people are shouting, children are laughing, trains are running, and buses are leaving.”
― Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years

“You are a city girl, what would you know about this kind of land?”
― Kenan Hudaverdi, Emotional Rhapsody

“... but she reckoned that in larger cities people were less alone, for they didn't all know each other so well.”
― Antonio di Benedetto, Zama

“La vida a la ciutat se'm complicava: hi havia lloguers per pagar, amors per trobar, gent amb qui rebolcar-se, sabors per tastar, contactes per fer, contractes per aconseguir i després buscar-te amics que et salvessin de tota aquesta intempèrie. La ciutat era una massa fumejant de mel, dolça i densa, calentona, però si et despistaves podia engolir-te sense miraments.”
― Irene Pujadas, Els desperfectes

“There is chaos; there is pollution. There is noise; there is suspicion. There is corruption; there is tussle. Even though I don’t understand this city, I don’t underestimate it. This is my city, and it has always invigorated me.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Our Nepal, Our Pride

“..eight or nine women and one extremely serious-looking man had decided to spend their Monday evening exercising with a demonic workout instructor n the Flatbush District rather than doing something sensible, like restocking their wine supply or doing a crossword.”
― Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

“Vagrants huddled in doorways, their hands tucked into their armpits, hats pulled down low, like sleeping birds. But they were city birds, dull in plumage and faded into their corners.”
― Byrd Nash, Ghost Talker

“They may live in our midst but I can never accept them, for they lay their hands upon us and we are all turned from tilling to barter, and hoard our silver since we cannot spend it, and see our children go without food that their children gorge, and it is only in the hope that one day things will be as they were that we have done these things. Now that they have gone let us forget them and return to our ways."
"Foolish woman," Nathan said. "There is no going back.”
― Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve

“Over the years, Roland had grown accustomed to the quiet atmosphere of Dr. Gray’s office. Despite being just off the main street, there wasn’t much commotion during the day. Some nights one might hear a few of drunks cackling outside as they wandered home from the pub, but aside from that the street remained undisturbed.”
― Ardin Patterson, Feral