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.

I haven’t travelled that much before so this is the first time I get to see the big cities of Europe. I’ve never even been to US.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Kissimmee has the best name, other than Hugsburg and Fornicatesville.

All around us, Karachi kept moving

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes...

There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself...

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, ‘neighborhood’ is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or...

Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of an-other, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary . . . or of waves of darkness . . . waves of fire . . . Perhaps of...

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You’ve never spoken before. You will. You’ll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal...

Like most cities, London could be a lonely place…

It all fell away then – the control, the independence . . . everything. She had known it would never be easy to findsolitude . . . to find herself. Not in this city, where...

Cities are 2% of the earth’s crust, but they are 50% of the world’s population.

Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was...

Toute transformation sociale (…) s’est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus profondes, dont l’expression rationalisée prend la forme du cosmos et de la nature de...

Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered...

My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything–certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again.

It’s very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future.

Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it...