Small City Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Charles Willeford

#6. 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

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

Ken Jennings

#8. 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

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

Leon Battista Alberti

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I was born in the small city of Hobart in Tasmania, Australia, in 1948. My parents were family physicians. My grandfather and great grandfather on my mother's side were geologists.

Elizabeth Blackburn

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. It's amazing, especially coming from the small city of Paterson, to have all of those people just being behind you and supporting your career and understanding where you come from.

Victor Cruz

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

Samantha Shannon

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. One word is enough to destroy an entire city provided that word is backed by anger. Drop down the bullets of anger; it destroys at the speed of light!

Israelmore Ayivor

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

Plato

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. I find it ironic how New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is so focused on such small issues as drink sizes, while ignoring the massive infrastructure challenges in New York - lousy roads, third-world airports, traffic jams, etc.

Mark Skousen

#35. In the city, I wake bolt upright in the small hours, convinced that intruders are marauding through our apartment despite Swiss bank-style security arrangements.

Mariella Frostrup

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. I like the idea of songs sung by those without big voices. You know, small birdsongs that rise above the noise of the city.

Kyo Maclear

#41. 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

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

Garth Risk Hallberg

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

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

Adam Dunn

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. San Francisco is one of my favourite cities in the world ... I would probably rank it at the top or near the top. It's small but photogenic and has layers ... You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done.

Ang Lee

#52. 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

#53. 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

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

Lorelei James

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

Andrew Ashling

#58. You will always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world

Constantine P. Cavafy

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. We looked as if we'd been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband's funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City.

Chris Cleave

#62. If the proposed ordinance is adopted it will hurt small women- and minority-owned businesses the most, the majority of which are already struggling mightily to do business in this city of higher-than average costs of doing business.

Randy Hamilton

#63. 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

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

J.G. Ballard

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.

Jane Jacobs

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. [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

#78. Start locally and build. Start small and grow. Start in your house, then move to your school, your book club, your gym, your church, your temple, your city.

Laurie David

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. My mother often says that she could never have done it if I had been the youngest, if she had other small children she had to cart around New York City for my auditions and go-sees (modeling auditions) and stuff.

Katherine Heigl

#82. 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

#83. On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

Alison Gopnik

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. In almost all city governments in America, the small group of people who don't want change are able to block change.

Alex Steffen

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. Practice trust in small matters for huge returns in the large ones.

Gina Greenlee

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. One must obey the man whom the city sets up in power in small things and in justice and in its opposite.

Sophocles

#97. 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

#98. The city, no matter how small, is corrupt and unrepentant, while the sun shines brighter in the country, making people more wholesome.

Lori Lansens

#99. When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

Jane Jacobs

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

Richard Peck