Cities At Night Quotes

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Tokyo is a very safe city. At night it becomes quiet the way New York never does.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

I love driving in the city at night.

I dont think there is anything on earth more wonderful than those wistful incomplete friendships one makes now and then in an hour's talk. You never see the people again, but the lingering sense of their presence in the world is like the glow of an unseen city at night--makes you feel the teemingness of it all.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Either these - unsaved people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.

Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.

Though one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

What an incredibly beautiful city at night Chicago is. Absolutely beautiful.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

I always view my music like a city at night, like Atlanta. I view my music in lights. So Far Gone would be my experiences in Toronto at night.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their "Hub," as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.