Suburban Quotes

#1. You can't just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.

Craig Venter

#2. 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

#3. But it's the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.

Meghan Daum

#4. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.

Oscar Wilde

#5. My dad was an FBI agent. My mom and dad were straight arrow types, and I had a conservative, suburban Orange County upbringing.

Steve Breen

#6. A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

Helmut Jahn

#7. May felt exhilarated around Bryant. He had always imagined that somewhere out there, away from suburban dullness, ardent young people were allowed to give freer rein to their thoughts. He felt as though he had arrived at a place he had always wanted to be.

Christopher Fowler

#8. In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.

Bjarke Ingels

#9. I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.

Jesse Eisenberg

#10. In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line.

Rick Perlstein

#11. California's drought affects everyone in the state, from farmers to fishermen, business owners to suburban residents, and everyone has a role to play in using precious water resources as wisely and efficiently as possible.

Frances Beinecke

#12. Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.

Erik Larson

#13. But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.

Barack Obama

#14. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are.

Oscar Wilde

#15. We have a new joke on the reservation: 'What is cultural deprivation?' Answer: 'Being an upper-middle class white kid living in a split-level suburban home with a color TV.'

John Fire Lame Deer

#16. The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

Gregory Crewdson

#17. Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

Anthony Trollope

#18. They're flowing out of Cook into the fringes. People move out of Chicago and into suburban Cook County and now they're losing to the outer suburbs.

Kenny Johnson

#19. It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who - all of a sudden - their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary,

Arne Duncan

#20. England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.

Hanif Kureishi

#21. I went to the University of Virginia and I came from, I grew up in suburban Philadelphia.

Tina Fey

#22. 'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.

Rob Sheffield

#23. I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn't being cultivated.

James Balog

#24. What crime writers are doing connects deeper into a cultural hunger. Crime is important. When you open up a book that has a body that's dead, that matters. It matters more than a certain level of suburban angst; it really does.

S.J. Rozan

#25. The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things

James Howard Kunstler

#26. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Marshall McLuhan

#27. 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

#28. You can use up all the slums for new development. In all the cities of the world, there are large areas of these. Also, you can avoid the spread of these silly suburban houses. Chicago has thousands of them all over the place.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#29. They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.

Stephen King

#30. Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs
what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?

Thomas Pynchon

#31. I'm from a nice, suburban, middle-class family, but my tattoos remind me where I've been.

Tom Hardy

#32. I'd been in love with her for years. I never left this suburban town. I didn't go to university. I went to Audrey.

Markus Zusak

#33. Lust comes creeping through the night to feed on hearts of suburban wives who learned to pretend when they met their dreams end.

Neil Young

#34. In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.

Jonathan Kozol

#35. The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

Noam Chomsky

#36. I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.

Edward Hirsch

#37. Sydney in general is eclectic. You can be on that brilliant blue ocean walk in the morning and then within 20 minutes you can be in a completely vast suburban sprawl or an Italian or Asian suburb, and it's that mix of people, it's that melting pot of people that give it its vital personality.

Baz Luhrmann

#38. People know Detroit for the cars, but the suburban areas of the city are really beautiful. It's much more inhabitable than people think. Many believe it's like Berlin at the end of World War II.

Leonard Slatkin

#39. I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

James Howard Kunstler

#40. If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous- looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap, dear house.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#41. It seems that in Baltimore, one of the most violent cities in America, jurors are far more reluctant to convict criminal defendants than in the suburban enclaves that ring the city.

David Simon

#42. Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.

Maurice Strong

#43. Who would have predicted a century ago that the richest civilizations in history would be made up of polluted tracts of suburban development dominated by the private automobile, shopping malls, and a throwaway economy? Surely, this is not the ultimate fulfillment of our destiny.

Alan Thein Durning

#44. For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

William H Gass

#45. I got arrested for graffiti. I got arrested - a lot of, like, underage drinking, drunk in public, shoplifting, you know, your various, like, suburban arrests, I guess.

James Franco

#46. Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows.

Stella Benson

#47. Is a direct connection between suburban sprawl and the spiraling cost of government, and most Americans don't see it yet, including many in government. Likewise,

James Howard Kunstler

#48. My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.

Tom Perrotta

#49. Coming from a little suburban town, I wasn't a hip city kid. I was quite the opposite, really. Songs like 'Saturday's Kids' rang a bell for kids all over the country. That song was about the kids I grew up with.

Paul Weller

#50. I had a happy childhood in a nice suburban area, pretty idyllic, upper middle class and very, very white. My dad is an attorney. My mother is a housewife. They had five kids in seven years: me, my brother, and three sisters. I'm the oldest. We were all very active. My mother was exhausted.

Anthony Jeselnik

#51. I'm finally a suburban housewife. Honestly, it's my dream come true.

Julia Sweeney

#52. My early prose style - this is so embarrassing - was sort of a suburban, Presbyterian knockoff of Woody Allen.

John Hughes

#53. When I was at university, there was such a strong delineation between city kids and those who had grown up the suburbs. City kids were so at home in the world, in a way that suburban kids take years to catch up, if indeed they ever can.

Meg Rosoff

#54. Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

Katherine Dunn

#55. He'd been filling up his Suburban - a feat that required a small business loan at current prices - and had missed Shanna's call.

Blake Crouch

#56. Cecelia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmer blue of their kidney shaped swimming pool, with its powerful underwater light, the perfect symbol of suburban bliss, except for that strange intermit sound like a baby choking that was coming from the pool filter.

Liane Moriarty

#57. Lordy, lordy, lordy do I love money. It is a character flaw, no doubt, one that springs from a panicked childhood in which I always felt as if our family was only a couple missed child support payments from being tossed onto the pitiless streets of our suburban New Jersey town.

Michael Ian Black

#58. I had spent hundreds of hours gazing out at the calm, conquered suburban landscape surrounding my school, silently yearning for the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, a freak accident that would give me super powers, or perhaps the sudden appearance of a band of time-traveling kleptomaniac dwarves.

Ernest Cline

#59. People are so cheap. Everyone wants quality, no one wants to pay for it. Here's the suburban dream
to hire great workers who are such meek morons that they don't have the guts to ask for a living wage.

Joan Bauer

#60. I wasn't always a demon.
My name is Maggie Frew, and I grew up a simple human girl in suburban Iowa. I don't carry a pitchfork, or have a forked tail. I'm not a creature from Hell. I'm a political campaign manager. Though, I guess some people might argue those are the same thing.

Patricia Murphy

#61. If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness ... if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other ... then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#62. In the darkened recesses of the Suburban, my opinion of the vampire rose considerably. There were far worse things than having to drink blood to survive. I could tolerate him, so long as he didn't try to make me his next meal.

Rose Wynters

#63. I make shoes for white suburban kids, not the poor black kids. That would be like opening a restaurant for people without stomachs.

Michael Jordan

#64. This house is a prison, a suburban Alcatraz.

Heather Demetrios

#65. The fact is inner-city black districts are not the same as suburban Republican districts. That's a fact. And people need to go and learn about the whole country.

Newt Gingrich

#66. The life of a bestselling novelist sounds like it ought to be spectacularly glamorous and fun, but in fact I spend most of my time incognito, and in fact were you to pass me in the street you would think I was just another dowdy suburban mom.

Jane Green

#67. On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston-are assigned to classes with no teacher.

Jonathan Kozol

#68. Until the end of elementary school, I lived in a suburban area, so the type of village I used to live in is borderline between village and the city, so I'm familiar with the rustic environment.

Bong Joon-ho

#69. I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper grey censorship of all our real human values ...

Jack Kerouac

#70. I mean, they say they've gotta change the street kids' lives. Well, that's true. But you can't take somebody from point A to point Z overnight. You can't make me a fucking suburban teenager now, after what's gone down. It'll never happen.

Jim Goldberg

#71. Folk wisdom: quaint sayings of urban sophisticates compiled from the suburbs.

Bauvard

#72. Jay-Z, he knows precisely who he's going for - 14-year-old white suburban girls.

Penn Jillette

#73. The slick bare tar, the same suburban station.

Robert Lowell

#74. I grew up in a suburban situation and I was constantly looking for the central, the town. I grew up craving. "Where's the town? Where's the people?" You get into a very isolated shell.

Debra Granik

#75. I believe that global warming is a myth. And so, therefore, I have no conscience problems at all and I'm going to buy a Suburban next time.

Jerry Falwell

#76. The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

Bertrand Russell

#77. My upbringing was very straightforward suburban working class upbringing.

Billy Bragg

#78. I grew up, until age 6, in Chicago. My parents rented their apartment and, at the end of the Depression, my parents wanted to replicate that situation. So, again, we lived in a somewhat suburban setting outside of New York City, and again, they rented.

Edmund Phelps

#79. Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril.

David Carr

#80. I hate these platforms that are all over the place today; they are all about grabbing attention. They are suburban! I never do a platform. Well, I did, in the 1970s, but that was a bad experience.

Manolo Blahnik

#81. Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.

David Byrne

#82. The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

Peter L. Bergen

#83. If you look at suburban education in New Jersey and New York, it's pretty strong, intact, doing a pretty good job. You cap taxes for those communities, can we reasonably predict it's going to be as strong 20 years from now?

Dan Malloy

#84. Thinking fascinates me, and I probably spend too much time in my mind. My wife says that my perfect world is to be in the Suburban driving, with her next to me and the boys in the back seat and complete silence for two thousand miles.

John Larroquette

#85. Punk rock party in a suburban home/
everybody's famous here but nobody's known/

U2

#86. How many of us are embracing the comforts of suburban America while we turn a deaf ear to inner cities in need of the gospel?

David Platt

#87. You give the shirt off your back, no questions asked, and you stand alone at the cavernous mouth of your suburban closet -
your entire life spent wondering
where your clothes went.

Kris Kidd

#88. I don't fight the suburban areas or collar counties. I get along with them; they're former Chicagoans anyway.

Richard M. Daley

#89. I was playing a new part in a new play: the messed-up adult child coming home in a truly pitiful state in the back of her parents' luxury sedan.
It was a glorious suburban homecoming.

Inna Swinton

#90. I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.

Robert Mapplethorpe

#91. Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying,

Lena Dunham

#92. I grew up in suburban New York City and London, England, where my dad was working.

J. C. Chandor

#93. I have always been drawn to designing fashions that are rebellious, like black leather jackets on suburban kinds, a corset dress, punk, blue jeans. I love that. Fashion changes all the time, and what is considered extreme or elegant or luxurious (or not luxurious) is changing all the time.

Jean Paul Gaultier

#94. The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.

Jonathan Kozol

#95. I'm a Sydney suburban boy shaped entirely by the western suburbs.

Bryan Brown

#96. She's extremely un-suburban and charismatic and has this way of making you feel you're the only thing standing between her and death due to boredom.

Susan Juby

#97. Defending her scandalized ex-husband had cost Jenna Wheeler's family greatly in the suburban standings - but the murder of Haley McWaid must have made life here fairly untenable. Parents

Harlan Coben

#98. suburban-cocooned ass

Bobby Adair

#99. Suburban sprawl has heavily damaged the balance of our cities, divorcing environmental context from design and removing the concept of scale from the creation of neighborhoods.

Avi Friedman

#100. Lies are so suburban...But murder is nice and clean.

Carole Morin