The City Quotes

“You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.

Another city will be found, better than this.

Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;

and my heart is-like a corpse-buried.

How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.

Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look

I see the black ruins of my life here,

where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted."

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.

The city will follow you. You will roam the same

streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;

in these same houses you will grow gray.

Always you will arrive in this city. To another land-do not hope-

there is no ship for you, there is no road.

As you have ruined your life here

in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.2”
― C.P. Cavafy

“On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.”
― Edward Conlon, Blue Blood by Conlon, Edward (2004) Paperback

“...it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought.”
― Don DeLillo, Américana

“Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the housetops. Sensual, amiable, and defenseless as it was, it would still take a little while to die.”
― Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place

“That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever?

"What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan...

"When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..."

"It's been going on a long time," said Irwell.

"All the more reason for a change," said Rud.”
― H.G. Wells, The Holy Terror

“The city is a fad, a shouting, bedazzlement, stupid imitation, damned consumerism. Making demands while not giving anything in return, a meaningless existence. What is worse is the inability to resist life in the city. City inhabitants are unable to resist fashions, even if they do not like them. There is no ability to resist the movement toward loss or voracious consumption. Even if you are an intruder, a recent arrival in the city and not one of its original inhabitants, who have become used to its ways, you will in the end become its laughing-stock. If you wish to maintain what you believe in, maintain your values and your non-urban behaviour, you will become an outcast and find no one who understands you. When you change, though in order to become urban, you will become awkward and fatuous.”
― Muammar Gaddafi معمر القذافي, Escape to Hell and Other Stories

“He also could feel it in his nostrils like an impalpable soot; the emanations of the millions about them, packed away at night in layers like martins in martin boxes and by day wriggling and squirming down between the tall buildings like larvae enclosed within the ribs of a dead horse; and with this effluvia of humans, the taint of burnt gasoline and burnt lubricating oils and the smoke and the coal grit and the dirt motes that were churned and rechurned and never at rest— the Pollen of the City.”
― Irvin S. Cobb, On an Island that Cost Twenty-Four Dollars

“In the country, a good he-snowstorm makes a lovely design for putting on a holiday greetings card. In the city it just makes an infernal mess for the street-cleaning department to wrestle with. … By midday of next day it would be licked to a custard— molten into puddles of foggy slush where cellar furnaces exhaled their hot breath up out of sidewalk gratings, roiled and fouled and crunched down beneath the heels and the tires of the town, flung up in crumply billows by the conscripted shovel crews, and under the park trees and on the park meadows would show a stark and grayish cast like the face of a grimy pauper whose corpse the undertaker scanted. And the longer it stayed there the sootier and the dirtier and the deader-looking it would get to be. You may worry the city with your winter weathers; you cannot keep her licked for any great length of time.”
― Irvin S. Cobb, On an Island that Cost Twenty-Four Dollars

“Under the modern Establishment, the function of the state has been reconfigured. Now, it exists to support private interests, including sectors - like the City - which have nothing but contempt for the state.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“As he still groped for that one moment, Father Dowling began to think that the whole city for years had been whispering its story to him out of the darkness in snatches, in a huge confessional where he could not see the faces…”
― Morley Callaghan, Such Is My Beloved

“It was a mild winter’s evening in ‘Japp’s Saloon and Speakeasy’, in the northwest corner of the only legal red-light area of the city. (The S.O.D.s believed in crime management.) Timaset Skooch leaned back in the aluminum framed chair, checking his cards carefully while wearing his best poker face. Across the table from him sat Jonn Deire, a large man who was trying very hard to out-poker face him and who didn’t enjoy jokes about his name much.”
― Christina Engela, Loderunner

“O vreme, orașul a fost blând și familiar, știam străduțele și clădirile din jurul casei noastre, peste care ningea acum greu, uscat, foșnind ușor. ... După un timp de tors leneș, orașul a început însă să mârâie ca un animal iritat. Nu mai știam drumul... orașu-a-nceput să ragă ca un leu din toate clădirile lui necunoscute, din străzile necunoscute, din ochii oamenilor necunoscuți.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“She went to the window and walked out into the glittering night. The city was already sleeping and the heavens took up the sound of the creatures below, the stars making a notation of their trills and bells, which rang in the darkness like glass. Whispers of Satie joined them from the room, and there seemed, in this inimitable moment, to be an agreement between time and the proximity of all things, as if clumsy humans might have a place in all this infinite, perfect darkness, if only they played at the edge. Out of sight, blindfolded, and in agreement.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“Truly I only loved the city for letting me leave.”
― Lara Prior-Palmer, Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race

“أنا أتأكّد يومًا بعد يومٍ أنّ المدينةَ تغيبُ ولا أحدَ بقادرٍ على الإمساك بها، تتبخّرُ مثلَ رغوةِ قهوةِ الكابوتشينا، وتنسحبُ بسرعة، وعندما تبلعُ ريقَك لا يبقىٰ إلّا شيءٌ من اللذةِ الناقصة”
― عالية ممدوح, التشهي

“وها أنت تتخلّصُ ممّا كان يمتنعُ عليك التخلّصُ منه، تلك المدينة، مدينتي، التي توهّمتُ أنّها ستكون حاضرةً للأبد، شديدةَ الرسُوخِ، وعَصِيّةً على الالتهام، فأغذّي أنا أيضًا شراهتي في تدميرِها وهلاكِها. هي تفرُّ وأنا لا أعُودُ”
― عالية ممدوح, التشهي

“Yes, the sounds of the city on this long Sunday – so many, all at odds, and all of them right.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Don’t waste a fine spring day, Jonah. There’s not as many of them in a lifetime as you think there will be.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club... for the gangster there is only the city, he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.”
― Robert Warshow, Gangster Film Reader