Life City Quotes

#1. From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life.

Bao Shu

#2. In 1968, the sanitation workers of Memphis tried to form a union. The city resisted. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life.

Robert Reich

#3. When I started travelling, I would go to a city and be on television and I used to get the question, 'Why do you work? If I were you, I'd just go and lie on a beach somewhere.' And I'd answer, 'Well, I wanted to make something of my life.'

Gloria Vanderbilt

#4. Jerusalem has been - and for many, still is - a metaphor for destruction and the vengeance of an offended God. She is the city where believers have killed unbelievers to give life to faith.

Amos Elon

#5. I had never really felt settled in Brooklyn. I think it had to do with growing up in New Jersey and being someone who her whole life wanted to live in the city, and the city meant Manhattan.

Dani Shapiro

#6. Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

Nancy Gibbs

#7. And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America's city. It was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana ... America's way of life was built here.

Charlie LeDuff

#8. I'd left Hawaii twice in my life, so I'd been on an island my whole life. I had no clue. I didn't know how to live in a city.

Maggie Q

#9. Suddenly I think that if I must retire from city life I might just as well live in France, where I would be happy, and I put the thought away as a private dream. - Elizabeth Pepys

Sara George

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

Aldous Huxley

#11. I grew up in the Midwest, so I have sort of an honorable moral code. But I moved to a city and joined a sort of fast crowd. A lot of people who grew up in the city sort of aren't aware of manners and other ways of life and 'common decency.'

Derek Blasberg

#12. Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

Truman Capote

#13. You have to accept that Batman is a fact of life in Gotham City, and on top of that, you have to accept that somehow this city manages to function with a police force that's 90% corrupt.

Greg Rucka

#14. Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are.

Jay McInerney

#15. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.

Orhan Pamuk

#16. He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.

John Vaillant

#17. I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#18. In the event of fire in any of the public buildings troops would be of vast service in the protection of public property, and should insurrection break out the protection of life and property would be more safe guarded by our company of regulars, than by the whole City.

Thomas L. Smith

#19. why do people always say they could get hit by a bus? Like life is just one big game of Frogger and people are getting struck left and right by dangerous city transport.

Colleen Oakley

#20. New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.

Charles Emmerson

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

Charles E. Rosenberg

#22. I grew up in New York and have lived here all my life. I think it's the best city in the world and can write about it with gusto and fervor and passion.

M.J. Rose

#23. I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.

Nellie Bly

#24. I had a dream about you last night.
We moved into a cabin in the countryside.
I couldn't handle the spiders.
You couldn't handle my drama.
I moved back to the city.

Michael Summers

#25. On the long dusty ribbon of the long city street,
The pageant of life is passing me on multitudinous feet,
With a word here of the hills, and a song there of the sea
And-the great movement changes-the pageant passes me.

John Masefield

#26. I went to an ordinary school in New York City with no other actors. I learned to compartmentalise different parts of my life. I was one person at home and then another person at work and for that reason my career didn't challenge my family life.

Brooke Shields

#27. No life form on this planet undergoes such a slow and graceful death as the tobacco leaf.

Mark McGinty

#28. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine

Cassandra Clare

#29. City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life.

Mason Cooley

#30. The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'.

Gemma Burgess

#31. All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris.

Peter Ackroyd

#32. I rather wonder what I am doing here. I enjoy city life, you know. The glittering lights, the constant companionship, the liquid entertainment. The lack of sudden monkeys.

Cassandra Clare

#33. Only you and I who love Jesus and have Him now before this life's death will be able to be among the special super-citizens of the Heavenly City, a special super-class of people!

David Berg

#34. My life wasn't just about one city, or one Epic, anymore. It was about a war. It was about finding a way to stop the Epics.
Permanently.

Brandon Sanderson

#35. I walk down the street and people don't go, 'My God, there he is.' I lead as normal a life as you can lead in New York City.

Graydon Carter

#36. Mumbai is not a city, it's a way of life

Subhasis Das

#37. We've always been suburb people, and we lived in the East Bay when I was in Oakland. This time around, we're staying in the city, and my kids are getting that city life experience, which is something you don't get too much of in Alabama.

Tim Hudson

#38. I'm always going to have a soft spot for this city in my life. This is where I sort of grew up. So many romantic mistakes.

Jessica Pan

#39. I think everyone should live in New York City if they ever get the chance at least once in their life. It's such a great place to live; there's a different energy about living in the city.

Odette Annable

#40. I'm single. I just moved to a new city. I'm sort of starting over. I'm in Los Angeles. I don't really know what my life is right now. It's not what I thought it'd be at 37, and I think a lot of people can relate to that.

Sutton Foster

#41. Have you ever experienced a beauty of soul, an esthetic grace, that was so intense it made you want to cry?
From Central Park Song ( A Screenplay )

Zack Love

#42. I'm constantly warning people that are involved in my life that I can go busk and make a living. I can make my rent in New York City in the subway, I promise, if I'm forced to.

Steve Earle

#43. 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 suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

Jane Jacobs

#44. Lincolnshire is the Idaho of England. You were either going to drive a tractor for the rest of your life or head for the city to work in a factory.

Bernie Taupin

#45. This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.

David Nicholls

#46. I know the consequences, Manon," Ilyse conceded. "I know the fate you endured might one day be my own. But I refuse to be a prisoner for the rest of my life.

Melika Dannese Lux

#47. The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

Mark Helprin

#48. I prefer the school of life.

Cassandra Clare

#49. I'm a New Yorker. I was there during 9/11 and I saw how, not only New York City stopped for a moment, we all took an inhale and exhale at the same time - the world united at that time, and it changed my life.

Aisha Hinds

#50. I spent a majority of my life in Kansas City, so I am a Chiefs and Royals guy. I used to work for the Royals for like five years in the suites department and in the stadium club restaurant.

David Cook

#51. Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.

Tahir Shah

#52. The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.

Edward I. Koch

#53. My parents were both from Scotland, but had been resident in Lower Canada some time before their marriage, which took place in Montreal; and in that city I spent most of my life.

Maria Monk

#54. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live
he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.

Oswald Spengler

#55. The mark of a good party is that you wake up the next morning wanting to change your name and start a new life in a different city.

Vance Bourjaily

#56. New York is a great place to be fed in the arts. The arts in general are a large part of my life. The city was my postgraduate course.

Kathleen Battle

#57. Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City ...

Christy Hall

#58. Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.

T.A

#59. No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.

William, Saroyan

#60. So all were gone at last, one by one, each swept out into the mighty flood tide of the city's life, there to prove, to test, to find, to lose himself, as each man must--alone.

Thomas Wolfe

#61. I love life on the road. I'm in a different city every night and it never gets old.

Demi Lovato

#62. Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.

Ann Douglas

#63. It is a city of villages, closely connected, each village dedicated to a different way of life.

Nancy Spain

#64. I was a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Limerick city, and I used to cover the district court meetings. All of life passed through the Limerick courthouse. Misery, malevolence, the dark side of humanity ... I tell ya, it made 'Angela's Ashes' look like 'The Wonderful World of Disney.'

Kevin Barry

#65. The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all.

Lynn Steward

#66. Its all big money, high rent, high prices in New York City now. The poor people completely got rolled over. I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's disgusting.

Ralph Bakshi

#67. In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

Jane Smiley

#68. No one, in the end, made it out of this life alive.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#69. Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.

Stephanie Clifford

#70. The best thing about a horrible city is that it makes you to understand the beauty of the pastoral life! The bad crystallizes the value of the good.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#71. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Jane Austen

#72. Hardest thing to face in life is isolation in your own city

Sunil Sharma

#73. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and

Will Durant

#74. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

Anna Quindlen

#75. I lived at Star City for more than a year ahead of my trip to Mir on May 18, 1991 in Soyuz TM-12. My life at Star City was so remote that learning Russian became my greatest priority.

Helen Sharman

#76. We cuss them because we're not good enough for them. We hate them because they wouldn't look at us, couldn't be bothered to give us an interview. I guess there's a Trent & Brent in every city, in every field. I didn't make it and I don't belong, so I'll just go through life hating them.

John Grisham

#77. It could take few drops of cooking oil to change your life, your neibourghs,your community, your village, your city, your county or your entire country.

Euginia Herlihy

#78. The importance of pedestrian public spaces cannot be measured, but most other important things in life cannot be measured either: Friendship, beauty, love and loyalty are examples. Parks and other pedestrian places are essential to a city's happiness.

Enrique Penalosa

#79. The life of the city cat is short but so sophisticated.

Jennifer Stone

#80. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.

Barbara Kingsolver

#81. Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man back home is talking, you better listen closely.

Brian Koppelman

#82. I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

Bill Bryson

#83. In the world in which we live, it is almost a necessity to be able to regain one's strength of body and spirit, especially for those who live in the city, where the conditions of life, often feverish, leave little room for silence, reflection and relaxed contact with nature.

Pope Benedict XVI

#84. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I'm always happy to leave, and I'm always happy to come back.

Jennifer Egan

#85. The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

David Levien

#86. Things end. Everything ends. But for a few days in a city full of hunger, and avarice, and alienation - in this fucked-up mess of a life spent wandering in the dark without a hand to hold on to - I was not alone. And neither were you.

Julio Alexi Genao

#87. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

Antony Gormley

#88. The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture which has become necessary to my life

M.P. Shiel

#89. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

James Baldwin

#90. I think that chain stores in general are really super depressing and I think it really sucks the life out of a city such as San Francisco.

Chicken John

#91. I came across humanity in Istanbul, and all I know about life comes from Istanbul, and definitely, I am writing about Istanbul. I also love the city because I live there, it has formed me, and it's me. Of course it is natural. If somebody lived all his life in Delhi, he will write about Delhi.

Orhan Pamuk

#92. We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

Theodore Roosevelt

#93. Rudy Giuliani did some phenomenal things in the city if you think of the transformation of the city and the quality of life.

Joe Lhota

#94. Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.

Ransom Riggs

#95. The train hit her with the sound of a meat-filled hefty bag smacking the pavement, and the effect was much the same, I guess. (Dark City Lights)

Warren Moore

#96. New York City is filled with random, quirky moments like this, chance collisions that just might change your life.

Hope Edelman

#97. I had come out of the city, where story-telling is a manufactured science, to the country where story-telling is a by-product of life.

Dana Burnet

#98. Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city.

Arthur Keith

#99. I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the tastes of the inhabitants, both present and gone.

Edwidge Danticat

#100. You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what makes it a safe haven for individuals everywhere (Maeve Brennan)

Elizabeth Winder