You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.

Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days’ time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The...

Follow your heart, Ithilnin,” Albirich repeated. “Time is precious. Don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

My life is hard. No one would rob me of that. The clothes I am wearing came out of a knotted up black plastic trash bag from a resale shop downtown. And not the downtown...

… Chicago divided your heart. Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it never can love you.

But believe it or not, I really do like to read. I don’t think anyone can ever pull the wool over your eyes if you stay prayed up and read. Frederick Douglass said that no...

My Friends I Will Always Remember, And My Enemies I Will Never Forget!

Tony’s concern disintegrated. He could not understand C.J.’s determination to court death on a daily basis. Or maybe he did understand, and this was what caused his frustration. So many found the same solution his...

All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew “cottons with big full skirts and university personalities” would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to...

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.

Kevin looks at me and I know he isn’t seeing the little girl I use to be, all pigtails and gangly limbs. He isn’t seeing my mother’s daughter or even my mother anymore. As his...

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will...

Although this man spoke pure fluent ghetto, she liked his spirit. She could tell he was attracted to her, and that he was being ever careful with his words.

You Can’t Change Your Life… Until You Change Your Heart, and You Can’t Change Your Heart… Until You Change Your Mind!

Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as ‘a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.’ But a start against whom? Who has stuffed...

A steampunk nationBaby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning ’causeOur art’s official and only partially artificialAnd our heart’s in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal butThere’s not where it settlesBecause it’s...

She stared at the bullwhip coiled Indiana Jones-style at his narrow waist, then at the black-handled dagger sheathed on his right hip. An obsidian rapier–Fae-forged and unbreakable–almost merged with one of the taped seams that...

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...

This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive and feeling, as...

I come from a young, hip-hop, urban world.

Failures Are The Cornerstones Of Success!

The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments

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...

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a...

I think that there will always be a need for Housing and Urban Development.

Don’t Rush Up The Stairs, you Just Might Fall. Take it One Step At A Time!

Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.

Aku kadang bertanya, kenapa manusia suka sekali mendobrak kenyamanan yang sudah ada. Atas nama mengikuti passion, kata hati, atau mungkin juga hasrat dan nafsu terliarnya.

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and...

I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not...

To Me, The Best Part Of Success, Is The Journey!

When I was three years old and in my mother’s arms, she looked down at me and said, “Son, the way I’m taking care of you now, when you get old, always have a woman...

Salah satu bentuk kemalasan seorang perempuan adalah untuk mencari jati diri yang selanjutnya paska berumahtangga. Rasa kenyamanan memang bisa menghancurkan.

You Don’t Have To Be A Crook To Be Successful!

The demon is crouched in the corner, between the Cheetos and the onion dip. It’s a small one, only about four feet tall: a low-level creeper. I flick my gaze over the spot like I...

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American’s great cities, appalling.

It’s Easy To Feel Like A Big Fish, When Your Pond is Just A Puddle!

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and...

She smells of her cooking and the perfume Eau d’Hadrien. My mother wore it, too. She used to cook, like Lili. Our house smelled of garlic and thyme instead of sadness.

Never Let The Roosters Wake You!

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and...

The arctic pavement turned into a whirlwind of viscous blood. The fiery shadows on the metropolitan walls blitzed him, avenging overachievers starved for vengeance. He fell into the abyss. His migraine made his head feel...

You Can’t Be A Hero To The World, If Your Aren’t First A Hero In Your Home!

With my grandma, every Sunday after church.

She’s got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.

You Can’t Replace A Star with A Lightbulb

A grey-suited figure with badly-scuffed shoes was squatted over a woman’s body, obscuring her face and upper torso. A loose, white dress; torn, now mostly red. A pattern of rose petals, drenched in blood. One...

Thank God For Writing, As Now I Can Work Until My Last Breath!