Cities Quotes - Page 84

In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.

The reality, sitting ten thousand miles away, is that we remain the country that inspires. We remain that shining city on a hill.

I think after 1970 or so, after I sold Soul City, I took off for awhile and didn't do too many gigs.

No one has the right to change Paris, the protesters say, and argue that the city is the patrimony of all mankind.

It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.

Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962

The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this -- that we manufacture everything there except men.

It is to labor, and to labor only, that man owes everything possessed of exchangeable value. Labor is the talisman that has raised him from the condition of the savage: that has changed the desert and the forest into cultivated fields; that has covered the earth with cities, and the ocean with ships; that has given us plenty, comfort, and elegance, instead of want, misery, and barbarism.

In the mornings when they were in the city, they had breakfast on a card table in Jeffrey's study

It would be a nice place if you took all the people out of the city.

London is a good fashion city. They're a little more daring. There's the element of the aristocracy, which is always interesting.

The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little.

Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

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.

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

I'm not from Indianapolis, but I like living in Indianapolis. If I were to explain it, I'd tell someone to imagine a city that perfectly captures the best and the worst of America. Imagine the truly American city, because that's what it is.

I love being in cities with lots of other people, because I'm reminded that there are billions of people like me, and we are each stuck inside of our minds, feverishly trying to crawl out to make connections with other people.

There is no city in the United States in which I can get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Columbia, Ohio.

As long as I'm in this city, I'm a lightning rod, ... People don't like me for a lot of reasons and I create all of them. I love it when they hate me. All my closest friends hate me.

Peter [Norman] never denounced us, he never turned his back on us, he never walked away from us, he never said one thing against what he stood for in Mexico City, and that was freedom, justice and equality for all God's people.

I come from the Town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of Destruction.