The City We Became Quotes

#1. The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.

Henry Adams

#2. We moved to the city when I was 7, and the lack of exercise made me frustrated. I started fighting with my sisters, and my parents put me in judo as an outlet. I became very competitive and won a lot of medals.

Cesar Millan

#3. The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness.

Maya Angelou

#4. I ran for my first office at 25 against an incumbent city councilman. I took 55% of the vote and became the youngest councilman in the area at the time.

James Knowles III

#5. Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

Evan Osnos

#6. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, and knowing nothing about Picasso, I had the audacity to knock on his door, became his friend, and took thousands of photographs, of him, his studios, his life and his friends.

David Douglas Duncan

#7. When you grow up in a city like Boston, where I grew up, a lot of kids became criminals or cops. I never really had a bad take on cops other than I hate when there's one behind me on the highway.

Donnie Wahlberg

#8. The newspapers were against me. They were telling me that the Australian dream was a home. But that dream became worse and worse as they had to live further away from the city. My dream became better as we could build higher and higher.

Harry Triguboff

#9. The 1890s was a decade when life began to change in urban America. Modern conveniences that we now take for granted came into use; women's roles became less restrictive; and San Francisco, a port city with influences from all over the world, was a lively place in which to reside.

Marcia Muller

#10. People have said I can come off a little trial-lawyerish. I tell people I never actually became a lawyer, but I play one at City Hall.

Christine Quinn

#11. I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn't. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.

Jan Koum

#12. Our
world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our
sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city
that sprawled below.

Azar Nafisi

#13. I wanted to be a New York City cop before I became an actor.

Erik Estrada

#14. I became a country music fan in 1990 when I moved to Colorado. It was my first exposure to it because I'm from a city. I've been a fan of country music ever since.

Ricky Schroder

#15. Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist, and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.

Roland Joffe

#16. I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth.

Eve Ensler

#17. He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

Tracy Chevalier