I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American Novelist
I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.
—W. C. Fields (1880–1946) American Comedian, Actor, Writer
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth’s narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
—H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American Science-fiction Writer
The city is an epitome of the social world.—All the belts of civilization intersect along its avenues.—It contains the products of every moral zone and is cosmopolitan, not only in a national, but in a moral and spiritual sense.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–80) American Preacher, Poet
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Satirist, Short Story Writer
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.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Comedian, Radio Personality
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.
—Johnny Carson (1925–2005) American Comedian
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Critic
Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.
—Edward Hoagland (b.1932) American Essayist, Novelist
The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
—Walt Whitman (1819–92) American Poet, Essayist, Journalist
I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital… not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
—John Ciardi (1916–86) American Poet, Teacher, Etymologist, Translator
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
Commuter—one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American Head of State, Military Leader
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist—this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul—a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
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.
—Dwight L. Moody (1837–99) Christian Religious Leader, Publisher
New York now leads the world’s great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn’t make a sudden move.
—David Letterman (b.1947) American Television Talk Show Host
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
The city is recruited from the country.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
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.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders.
—Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American Biographer, Novelist, Socialist
All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.
—Tacitus (56–117) Roman Orator, Historian
God the first garden made, and Cain the first city.
—Abraham Cowley (1618–67) English Poet, Essayist
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