Quotes About A Small City

#1. Even in the heart of America, if a small city is not connected in some demonstrable fashion to other continents, it is dead.

Robert D. Kaplan

#2. This palace,' he had said, 'is a small city, past lying close to present like one shoe next to another. If you look at them in a mirror, left becomes right, present becomes past ...

Patricia A. McKillip

#3. By the end of a short walk, the septic tip of a cane probably collects enough germs to destroy a small city.

Charles Willeford

#4. It's a small city where I have a lot of time to think. The orchestra and I have had a chance to connect very well in this time. I think of all the millions of people in Los Angles. There aren't that many millions of people in all of Sweden.

Gustavo Dudamel

#5. I'm just a girl from Amsterdam. It's a small city. Everybody knows Amsterdam, but it's still a small city. To come from there, to work with Will. i. am ... it's like, 'What happened?! What did I do right?'

Eva Simons

#6. The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city.

Leon Battista Alberti

#7. Montevideo is a beautiful city with a very European style. It's a small city, but with a lot of cultural movement and a lot of personality. At the same time, it's a very chill city.

Juan Campodonico

#8. Portland is the perfect weekend getaway. I studied acting in Portland and lived there for five years. It's a small city with so much to do. There's beautiful scenery, a great bar scene, and so many fabulous restaurants.

Kenneth Choi

#9. I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

Laurence Olivier

#10. He was from upstate New York. Albany or something. A small city so buried in snow it looked flat white in satellite pictures for a third of the year.

C.D. Reiss

#11. I grew up in Bulgaria in a small city on the Black Sea Coast, so I was very interested in the sea, marine life, and everything related to it. But it was also a very dark place at night, so I could see the stars. And I just got very interested in it.

Dimitar Sasselov

#12. It's very hard to be cut off in Glasgow because it's such a small city. You know, we have the highest rate of per-capita imprisonment, certainly in Britain, maybe in Europe. We have a very high murder rate here. So most people will know someone who's been to prison.

Denise Mina

#13. I lived in a small city on the Mississippi River across from Iowa, so I didn't have a country upbringing, but in high school we would go drink kegs in cornfields.

Lissie

#14. Money plays an important role in football, but it is not the dominating factor. When Chelsea play a Carling Cup game in a small city, and it could result in a draw - the excitement, the spirit, the atmosphere - that's the real beauty of football in England.

Roman Abramovich

#15. What I like about Oxford is how small it is; it's really more of a big town than a city.

Samantha Shannon

#16. I grew up in the small town of Greenfield Center, New York, which is in the foothills of the Adirondacks not far from the city of Saratoga Springs. It is a place I love, close to the forests and the mountains.

Joseph Bruchac

#17. Within my hearing you have spoken of the beauty of this small city. How standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun.

Neil Gaiman

#18. I rent a small brick bungalow within a loop of other small brick bungalows, all of which squat on a massive bluff overlooking the former stockyards of Kansas City. Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas. There's a difference.

Gillian Flynn

#19. It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

Philip Reeve

#20. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

Barack Obama

#21. Even though New York is the safest big city in the nation, there are still far too many illegal guns on our streets. Nearly all of them arrive from out of state - and most are sold by a small group of rogue gun dealers who refuse to obey federal laws.

Michael Bloomberg

#22. I come from a very small city in a rather remote part of America, where writers simply weren't part of the daily fabric.

Lynn Flewelling

#23. My dad grew up in Banbridge, Northern Ireland, desperate to get to London. I grew up in London, so I don't know what it's like to yearn for the big city from a small town.

Daniel Radcliffe

#24. Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.

Aldo Leopold

#25. I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater.

Natasha Lyonne

#26. Even in a city as small as Ferrara, you can manage, if you like, to disappear for years and years, one from another, living side by side like the dead

Giorgio Bassani

#27. The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.

John Gunther

#28. I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

John Darnielle

#29. Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremor, a tremble, a breath.

Lauren Oliver

#30. I grew up in a small town in West Virginia called Kenova. It's the city where the plane crashed from Marshall University. I watched the mountain burn, and my cousins were the volunteer firemen. I was 6 years old at the time.

Brad D. Smith

#31. I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users.

Ken Jennings

#32. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.

Emily St. John Mandel

#33. Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#34. One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city
as I once did for a couple of years.

Edward Abbey

#35. The country is the place for children, and if not the country, a city small enough so that one can get out into the country.

Theodore Roosevelt

#36. In a city where most of the wealth is controlled by a small few, certain things are overlooked, particularly when it comes to the assertion of privilege.

Ellen Kushner

#37. Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County - except for a small sign that tells you.

Robert Reich

#38. In terms of any sacrifices at the time [of World War II], I was somewhat protected living on a small farm where there was food, different perhaps from living in a city environment. I know such things as gas rationing did exist, but it wasn't anything that interfered with my daily activity.

Paul Smith

#39. I'm a small-town guy, and moving to a huge city might be an adjustment.

Adam Dunn

#40. Never steal anything so small that you'll have to go to an unpleasant city jail for it instead of a minimum-security federal tennis prison.

P. J. O'Rourke

#41. Outside, the city glowed, the violence and bustle made calm and beautiful by even such a small distance. The wail of the sirens and angry blat of the security alerts became a kind of music there, transformed by the mystical act of passing above waves.

James S.A. Corey

#42. I think small business is struggling in New York City. It's a fantastic market, it's a very appealing market, there's lots of opportunity, at the same time it's a very difficult place to build a small business.

Bill De Blasio

#43. In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip.

Mona Simpson

#44. She'd rather be anonymous in a big city than infamous in a small town.

Lorelei James

#45. A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.

Louis Kahn

#46. The city of Wildwood has been fantastic in helping us and supporting this event. This is a small way of the Soul saying thanks to our fans.

Ron Jaworski

#47. Naodyma isn't exactly a one-temple town, you know.

Andrew Ashling

#48. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

E.B. White

#49. As a kid I never had the impulse to climb anything. I think that most kids who live in small towns or rural areas outside of the city, that's what they do - climb walls, or trees, or whatever. To me, it was more dance classes and not being very boyish.

Jamie Bell

#50. Imagine how titanic an echo chamber this great city would seem without the noise of eve none of mine. A huge bronze bell deprived of one hidden small iron clapper, its sole reason for being, its single means of song.

Allan Gurganus

#51. In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.

J.G. Ballard

#52. The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It's possible that no one who didn't grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.

Emily St. John Mandel

#53. You come from the city and think small means simple when all it realy means is complicated in a smaller place. Which sometimes adds to the complication.

Carol Anshaw

#54. I come from a very small rural village in northern Germany, and being an actor never even seemed like a possibility. I thought you would have to live in a big city, or be discovered somewhere, or be born into an artistic family, which I certainly wasn't.

Diane Kruger

#55. A marine snail gliding through the familiar city. Only in a dream could I move so gently along with the small human heartbeat in rhythm with the tug tug heartbeat of the tugboat, and Paris unfolding, uncurling, in beautiful undulations.

Anais Nin

#56. In a city, there's more room to be, where in a small town, you have to squish yourself down a little bit. And it's exciting for me to be pursuing a career where I don't have to be small.

Halsey

#57. I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

Richard Price

#58. I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: 'Oh my God, what a blessing.' Then you realise it's important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Paulo Coelho

#59. Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world, took the midnight train going anywhere ...
Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit, took the midnight train going anywhere ...

Journey

#60. And somewhere
out there,
in the river of
addicts,
alcoholics,
wife beaters,
doormats,
overeducated legalized thieves,
fascist police,
and bitter rivalries
someone told me
it's a good city,
and I don't know
what's more frightening

Phil Volatile

#61. I've discovered something interesting," she said. "If you ever want to avoid somebody, this city's as small as a postage stamp. But if you ever really want to run into somebody, if you really hope and pray, it's as big as an ocean.

John Burnham Schwartz

#62. As a kid growing up in a small town in Washington State, my only exposure to New York City was through movies. The town with its towering skyscrapers, fascinating people and teeming energy absolutely captivated me.

Robert Osborne

#63. Murder was apparently too common-place in the big city to attract much notice.
Poor Luther, thought Lucy, as she headed back to the hotel. Even in death he was only a big fish in a small pond.

Leslie Meier

#64. [On New York City:] Were all America like this fair city, and all, no, only a small proportion of its population like the friends we left there, I should say that the land was the fairest in the world.

Frances Trollope

#65. Even though I was chronologically 21, I was pretty immature and naive for my age, having grown up in a small, isolated ranching town, eighty desolate miles from the nearest city, and back when there was much less cultural homogenisation by way of TV.

Susan Schneider

#66. I live in a small apartment. There's only so much Batman memorabilia a guy can hang on to in New York City.

Robin Lord Taylor

#67. I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community - the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don't know what it would be like.

Karin Fossum

#68. Ever since I was a little kid, I always dreamed of being a Big City kid, because I grew up in a very small town up north in Canada. I have to say I just love the city lights at night.

Dustin Milligan

#69. Oxnard was the biggest city in Ventura County. Its unattractive name was that of a sugar beet farmer who built a processing plant in the settlement in the late nineteenth century. The city totally surrounded Port Hueneme, where there was a small U.S. Navy base.

Michael Connelly

#70. I was raised in Oklahoma. I was actually born in Tulsa, but I grew up in a small town on the west side of Oklahoma called Elk City on a farm, where my dad grew up, actually.

Kelli O'Hara

#71. I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

Nelson Algren

#72. In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible.

Elizabeth Goudge

#73. I've traveled around the country and I read local newspapers and all of that, and it's a sad, sad thing to go from city to city and see the small newspapers and they're tiny. They're tiny not only in size but also in scope.

Jim Lehrer

#74. Being a lawyer, even in a city as large as Chicago, is like being a citizen of a small town. I love watching the life of the town play out. You know, the rise and fall of individual lives in the entire community is just fascinating to me.

Scott Turow

#75. San Francisco has a flowers-in-your-hair kind of vibe, while Chicago's got this very funny, big-city/small-town coolness to it.

Dave Matthews

#76. I love San Francisco so much. I call it the Emerald City and have been coming here since 1992. I have a few old friends that live here, and my aunt and uncle live in Oakland. I think it's a magical city - it's big, sexy and very 'cosmo' with a small-town feel.

Andy Cohen

#77. A city is a crazy concrete jungle whose people at the end of each day somehow make a small step ahead against terrible odds.

Herb Caen

#78. Whether you live in a city or a small town, and whether you drive a car, take the bus or ride a train, at some point in the day, everyone is a pedestrian.

Anthony Foxx

#79. Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

Richard Peck

#80. We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?

Jimmy Wales

#81. I can't do small talk really, and that's fine. I've got old friends and family that love me, thank God. I'm grateful for what a city gives you access to, but I do feel that I'm only here until I figure out how to get out again.

Laura Marling

#82. When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange, because it began before I even knew what a city was.

John Wyndham

#83. On the balcony of our small flat in a city of small flats.

Jerry Pinto

#84. I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute; but I know how to raise a small and obscure city to glory and greatness ... whereto all kindreds of the earth will pilgrim.

Themistocles

#85. The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer's vocabulary - Fermi was only then inventing that specialty - but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city.

Richard Rhodes

#86. We should figure out how to do this so that some parents don't feel disenfranchised, angry and upset. It says a lot about the state of where we are in the city, the role of parents and the reality of small school and combining schools.

Lisa Randall

#87. Growing up in the Midwest, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who, as a young widow running a small business in 1920s Kansas City, had known firsthand the old Pendergast regime and its classic combine of politics and organized crime.

Roger Morris

#88. He runs City Hall like a small family business and keeps everybody on a short rein. They do only that which they know is safe and that which he tells them to do. So many things that should logically be solved several rungs below finally come to him.

Mike Royko

#89. Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn't feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble.

Heather Demetrios

#90. And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#91. At Guantanamo Bay, we could create a West Berlin, a free small city within the Communist nation that could trade freely with the U.S. and elect its own officials.

Elliott Abrams

#92. Most things, even the greatest moments on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremor, a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration.

Lauren Oliver

#93. Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you'll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

Sylvia Earle

#94. I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.

Jacob K. Javits

#95. That's the trouble with the suburbs: it's not a city, so you're not anonymous, and it's not a small town, so that people really care about you, but everybody kind of knows each other's business, so you're very judged.

Anne-Marie Duff

#96. I think my songs are singing to the rural heart. It's not whether you're from a big city or the middle of nowhere in a small town.

Rodney Atkins

#97. To sit on the front steps - whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city - and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color.

Harvey Milk

#98. I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.

Ben Schott

#99. The greatest fear that haunts this city is a suitcase bomb, nuclear or germ. Many people carry small gas masks. The masses here seem to be resigned to the inevitable, believing an attack of major proportions will happen.

David Wilkerson

#100. I hike a lot. The view and the air up in the hills are much greater than the hustle and bustle of the city. It makes it all look so silly and small.

Inbar Lavi