Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a...

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,’ [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. ‘They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that...

…cities are murky places – hatching grounds for monsters…

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity,...

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This...

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we...

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city...

God gave us ground we created a city, God gave us time we need to create a future.

Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren’t at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn’t...

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would...

The world’s major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back...

It’s the place built out of Man’s ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man’s endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities...

In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than...

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn’t necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still...

…Why are corporations so fleeting?…Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights....

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with...

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a...

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population...

A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:First,...

Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way – as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago – they find a way to just carry on. But you’re stressed out. You’re...

I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds...

There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for...

C’est un plaisir que de supputer, subodorer, côtoyer le mystère qui se tramait dans les quartiers, villages et ruelles de Montréal, et de se demander comment tout ça allait finir. J’avais confiance. J’avais confiance en...

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath...

You can’t love a city if you have no memories burried there.

Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from...

Some places will, however, be left behind. Not every city will succeed, because not every city has been adept at adapting to the age of information, in which ideas are the ultimate creator of wealth.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

On November 15th, 2008, in over 300 cities, 4,000 children were adopted in one day.

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least,...

The city gives even to children a sophisticated look that baffles the casual psychologist.

…Americans didn’t stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off...

Before them is the most beautiful city she has ever seen, has ever imagined. Golden rooftops shine brightly; windows made from diamonds and rubies gleam; tall buildings reach toward the clouds. She is again overwhelmed,...

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. ‘Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!’ we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should...

The world is a wide place where we stumble like children learning to walk. The world is a bright mosaic where we learn like children to see, where our little blurry eyes strive greedily to...

Toward the end of the Second World War, anew consciousness arose amongst the publicand policy makers of the Western World. Afterten years of crippling economic depressionand another five at war, the public demandedsomething new from...

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller’s, only to know that one might. A city always...

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don’t have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and...

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

I don’t know what London’s coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.

Martin thought of the iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both...

Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.

If you don’t keep your country clean, nobody can do that for you.