Top 100 Quotes About City Life
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?
Neil Gaiman
#7. I like to read, walk, cook, and travel to cities. We live in the country, so we miss museums and the bustle of city life.
Beverly Cleary
#8. You need to bring your awakening into city life. Bring it into fast-paced complexity where it thrives.
John De Ruiter
#9. The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#10. I'm always kind of hoping that I'll get a movie that shoots in Alabama so I can go back and kind of get a break from my city life.
Nolan Gould
#12. 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
#14. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It's here, but I have no names for it.
Robert M. Pirsig
#15. WHAT MAKES CITY LIFE MEANINGFUL IS THE THINGS WE HIDE.
Orhan Pamuk
#16. [Anne, commenting on city life]
I think I would probably come to the conclusion that I'd like it for a while ... but in the end, I'd still prefer the sound of the wind in the firs across the brook more than the tinkling of crystal.
L.M. Montgomery
#17. I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.
Stone Gossard
#18. It deals with so many different aspects of living in South Africa the racial issues of South Africans and Asians with poverty with the reality of children orphaned by AIDS the transition from village life to city life.
Laura Thielen
#19. New York City life is different from all other city life. It's incredibly relentless and fast, and I think when I first got here, it was incredibly exciting. It was also so hot. I didn't know New York got so hot. I'm not a fan of the heat!
Matthew James Thomas
#21. Hip-hop - it's the safari: it allows people who aren't under those circumstances to come closer to inner-city life, to explore it without actually being in danger. It's something kids in middle America indulge in to be rebellious.
Curtis Jackson
#22. Yet for quixotic reasons
namely, that I enjoyed writing obits
I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
Avi Steinberg
#23. You have to understand, now, I'm a momma's boy. I'm from the south. My way of being raised is totally different than the big city life. I truly was a country boy.
Terry Bradshaw
#24. The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life
Joseph Rykwert
#25. In Amsterdam, the river and canals have been central to city life for the last four centuries.
Janet Echelman
#26. Descending, I went wandering whither chance might lead, in a still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment; and I got - I know not how - I got into the heart of city life.
Charlotte Bronte
#27. City life is stressful. Everybody is running around like crazy, stuck in traffic jams trying to make meetings, trying to make ends meet, trying to meet deadlines, trying to get kids to and from activities. There aren't enough hours in the day for all this business.
Rebecca Pidgeon
#28. Here in the Outer City, life isn't linear like it is in the Dahn. Life is lived in fragments, scattered in the pitted and uneven, dirty streets. They're picked up as you get a chance, and dropped back to be trampled over when the Corporation gets in the way.
RaeLynn Fry
#29. City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.
Stephen King
#30. It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.
Virginia Euwer Wolff
#31. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.
Hamlin Garland
#32. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.
James Baldwin
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Hardest thing to face in life is isolation in your own city
Sunil Sharma
#37. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
Jane Austen
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.
Tahir Shah
#45. It is a city of villages, closely connected, each village dedicated to a different way of life.
Nancy Spain
#46. Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.
Ann Douglas
#47. I love life on the road. I'm in a different city every night and it never gets old.
Demi Lovato
#48. 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
#49. No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.
William, Saroyan
#50. Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.
T.A
#51. Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City ...
Christy Hall
#52. 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
#53. 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
#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. 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
#56. The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.
Edward I. Koch
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. New York City is filled with random, quirky moments like this, chance collisions that just might change your life.
Hope Edelman
#63. 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
#64. Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.
Ransom Riggs
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. The life of the city cat is short but so sophisticated.
Jennifer Stone
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.
Charles E. Rosenberg
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.
John Vaillant
#92. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.
Orhan Pamuk
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Aldous Huxley
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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