Short City Quotes

#1. The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights)

Tom Callahan

#2. Edinburgh suited Ann; she liked the tall, dignified buildings of grey stone, the short days that sank into street-lamped evenings at five o'clock, and the dual personality of the city's main street, which on one side had glittering shops and on the other the green sweep of Princes Street Gardens.

Maggie O'Farrell

#3. She shuffled with her head bowed, her dark eyes drifting to avoid contact, and she screamed in bed at night. (Dark City Lights)

Jim Fusilli

#4. Short or long to Goblin City?
The straight way's short
But the long way's pretty ...

Terry Jones

#5. In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")

Peter Straub

#6. Well why don't you lean over this counter a little more and give me your best kiss, and then I'll tell you if I want you to take me out to dinner.

Zack Love

#7. Fear is the short road to death and this world,
Changed by the flux of decay:
Survival is the exception for weary men.

From the new book The Waning

Ellen Mae Franklin

#8. 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

#9. That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams.
The girls of 1929.

Anna Godbersen

#10. History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights)

Kat Georges

#11. 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

#12. The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.

John Guare

#13. I worked all day in back ofa hot van snipping off dog balls, I can cut one more pair. (Dark City Lights)

Thomas Pluck

#14. It is nothing short of baffling to me how a city like Melbourne, where I struggle to find accessible facilities on a very regular basis, could be considered the most livable city in the world. I suppose it all depends on what makes a city 'livable' for you.

Stella Young

#15. I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.

Gay Talese

#16. It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of "oral painting" could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. ("A Short Guide To The City")

Peter Straub

#17. When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.

Feist

#18. In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

Rabih Alameddine

#19. While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)

S.J. Rozan

#20. The alumni of Second City from John Belushi to Martin Short have changed my entire life and brought a new kind of comedy to America and the World.

Bernie Brillstein

#21. The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

Michel De Certeau

#22. Sometimes I help him out and sometimes he helps me out, and sometimes he tries to push me through the wall. (Dark City Lights)

Parnell Hall

#23. I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born.

Eric Kandel

#24. Can the vast technology beneath our gaze be anything but a representation? Any optical artifact ... The city panorama is a theoretical (ie visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and a misunderstanding of processes.

Michel De Certeau

#25. Frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.

Jane Jacobs

#26. When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school.

P. J. O'Rourke

#27. The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations. (Dark City Lights)

Robert Silverberg

#28. She resents the chipped paint of the table and the dingy closet they call a dressing room. (Dark City Lights)

Annette Meyers

#29. There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

Peter Thiel

#30. Having Black hair is unique in that Black women change up styles a lot. You can walk down one street block in New York City and see 10 different hairstyles that Black women are wearing: straight curls, short cuts, braids - we really run the gamut.

Queen Latifah

#31. It was as if my sould had left my body, floated up to the ceiling, and was watching me destroy my own career with one deliberately assaultive punch. (Dark City Lights)

Peter Hochstein

#32. A New York plate that said you die. (Dark City Lights)

Ed Park

#33. The average life expectancy for a black man in an American city is something like twenty-three very short years. The reality of that had never fully kicked in before, but it did that night. And I thought, hell, I'm at risk just walking around.

Suzanne Brockmann

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Jennifer Stone

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

Charles Willeford

#39. I like Toronto a lot, it's a good city. The only thing that really annoys me about Toronto is that you're turning Maple Leaf Gardens into a grocery store, which is absolutely nothing short of disgusting.

Rick Wakeman

#40. I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.

Langston Hughes

#41. I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights)

Jerrold Mundis

#42. A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.

S.J Perelman

#43. Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren't any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn't need one. (Dark City Lights)

Peter Carlaftes

#44. But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself-oh, very gently-upon my heart.

Ray Russell

#45. Only criminals and madmen walk into Central Park after midnight...or, occasionally, an actor. (Dark City Lights)

Jane Dentinger

#46. It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights)

Bill Bernico

#47. So I'm delighted to open up a bit about these particular details, in honor of Valentine's Day (when every balding, chubby, and short actuary wants people - especially the babes out there - to know about his studly past"
From: "My Best Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

Zack Love

#48. And on my fourth morning in Naples, I woke up alone. There was a note on the table with the breakfast that Cinzia had quietly prepared for me. It read, "It could never be. But that's why it will always be - perfectly divine. Cinzia"
City Solipsism: A Short Story

Zack Love

#49. New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#50. A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)

Jonathan Santlofer

#51. That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

Eve Kagan

#52. Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.

Lawrence Block

#53. I'm looking for something new to believe in that isn't the way people yearn at night in the city.

Constance Renfrow

#54. A short woman might be difficult to see on a crowded city street, particularly if she has disguised herself as a mailbox, and people keep putting letters in her mouth.

Lemony Snicket

#55. When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

Greg Kinnear

#56. Youth is marked by a breathtaking novelty that diminishes with each year of age - until life becomes a delusive struggle to break routines, escape the ordinary, and rediscover the joy of discovery.

Zack Love

#57. Nevertheless we cherish all books, especially the unread ones, for who knows what secrets they might yield one day?
- p.397, as by Larry Zagorski, in his short story "The City of the Sun

Jake Arnott

#58. I want to feel like I'm making a difference in this world. And I want some time for living rather than just working. Life is for living, isn't it? It can't be all just for working

Zack Love

#59. No man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time

Plato

#60. On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city.

J.G. Ballard

#61. Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

Anthony Trollope

#62. The dimple in his left cheek was ironic-it gave the impression that he was sweet as a cupcake. (Dark City Lights)

Elaine Kagan

#63. Yet again, the family of a young black man is grieving a life cut short. Yet again, the streets of an American city are marred by violence. What we have seen in Baltimore should, indeed I think does, tear at our soul.

Hillary Clinton