City Life Quotes

“All those ants scurrying about like rats in a maze, going back and forth to the same few locations day after day, thinking the cheese they’re sniffing for will somehow magically appear on the routes they cover over and over again. They’re born into the programmed maze, so they can’t even conceive of a different way of life. Not only can’t they believe in a different way of life, but they’re programmed to scoff and ridicule the few freethinkers who do. After the ridiculing, they go back to their programming, pushing buttons and pulling levers for no reason. Ah, the good old rat race that never ends till cancer comes a knockin’.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“[Poem: Slates of Grey]

Sullen faces like slates of grey—
What I’d seen on a walk today.

Bodies rushing bodies bolting
Time for life a disregarding.

Money to make and to grow old
What about the hands to hold?

Deadlines, projects, people to meet
What about our own two feet.

Sullen faces like slates of grey...
What I’d see most anyday.”
― Jess C Scott, Trouble

“শ্যামবর্ণের রোগা ভাঙ্গা গালওয়ালা এই লোকটাকে ওসমান অনেকবার দেখেছে। কোথায়? এই বাড়ির সিঁড়িতে? তাই হবে। আরো অনেক জায়গায় এর সঙ্গে দ্যাখা হয়েছে। কোথায়? স্টেডিয়ামে? হতে পারে। গুলিস্তানের সামনে সিনেমার পোস্টার দেখতে দেখতে? হতে পারে। পল্টন ময়দানের মিটিংযে? হতে পারে। ভিক্টোরিয়া পার্কে? আরমানিটোলার মাঠের ধারে ? ঠাটারিবাজারের রাস্তার ধারে বসে শিককাবাব খেতে খেতে? হতে পারে। বলাকা সিনেমায় পাশাপাশি দাঁড়িয়ে পেচ্ছাব করতে করতে? হতে পারে। নবাবপুরে অনেক রাতে ঠেলাগাড়ির পাশে দাঁড়িয়ে হালিম খেতে খেতে? হতে পারে। আমজাদিয়ায় পাশের টেবিলে তর্ক করতে করতে? হতে পারে। মুখটা তার অনেকদিনের চেনা।”
― Akhteruzzaman Elias, চিলেকোঠার সেপাই

“...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“But you’re out of another world old kid … You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.”
― John Dos Passos

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
― Frank O'Hara

“I hear nothing but the hustle and bustle of the city. Cars with flashing lights zip past me. People talk, some loud, some quiet. I whisper to myself. “This is what it’s like to go unnoticed.” I take in a deep breath and inhale the freezing air. It smells like ice here. Ice and cigarettes.”
― Rachel Ellynn M., mind weaving

“When gangs took over the [abandoned public land in Philadelphia] and the neighborhood took a turn for the worse, horses became a way of saving lives. By getting boys interested in raising a horse rather than killing another human being, these cowboys gave the youth something positive: father figures, focus, and the ability to stand tall.”
― G. Neri, Ghetto Cowboy

“It required an enormous amount of energy and time just to do errands like getting groceries. She was always sweaty after she got groceries.”
― Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise

“Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.”
― Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise

“On city harp strings ‘neath cotton ball clouds,
Pigeon to pigeon their stories they sing,
Wafting flocks gather in soft, cooing crowds;
Amid rush traffic, a prelude to spring,
One with their nature, harmony within,
Above street clatter, perched, resting their bones,
Primed for the vernal bounty to begin,
Soothing the clamor with light, dulcet tones;
Whiffs of smog-filled drafts like bellows pulse through,
Unfazed are they by our mad world of haste,
The calm bevy awaits winter’s adieu,
Unconsumed by thoughts of no time to waste,
Nature presides with unshakable pride,
The seasons shall turn with a feather’s glide.”
― Marie Helen Abramyan

“The city slid by — shop windows glowing, neon reflected on the glass, people in coats and holding umbrellas. Everything moved on, alive in its own rhythm — without her.
Chapter 39”
― Irina Semikop, Voluntary pain

“In the city, people often feel lonely amongst so many people, but country towns, being more codependent, tend to be more connected.”
― Donna Goddard

“As for those who come to the big cities and change, fanciful cities just stimulate their inner desires.”
― Jordan Hoechlin

“Political historian Barouth Regorab had likened the difference between a planetary government and the Galactic Senate to that between a rural community and a metropolis: “When a person depends upon their neighbor for assistance during the harvest—when strangers are few and familial ties bind the farmer to the freighter captain—the greatest danger is shunning or exile. Mollifying your peers becomes a matter of survival. You have an incentive to iron out differences, or if necessary to bury any radical beliefs that would put you at odds with your community.
“In a city of millions, however, a person may build a tailor-made community inside the larger organism. Anger your neighbor and you may move in with a friend. Become an outcast among your co-workers and you may take a job with a competitor. Diverse arts and philosophies may flourish without the flattening effect of more tight-knit communities, and differences may be celebrated. Yet a lack of common ties can also cause neighbors to see one another as rivals. Ideological opponents can be dismissed without need for engagement. And good people may slip through the cracks, lost in the chaos and written off as someone else’s problem.”
― Alexander Freed

“This city eats pretty boys like us alive if we let it.”
― Rob Costello, An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys

“City streets are a feast of faces; choose what to behold.”
― Aloo Denish Obiero

“It's not who you are that counts - it's what your're part of.”
― Rafał Kosik, Cyberpunk 2077: No_Coincidence

“I’d never quite warmed to the whirl and twirl of the city. … Sea and sky and craggy cliffs were more my speed.”
― Bobbi French, The Good Women of Safe Harbour

“My friends, is there anything quite like entering Point James for the first time? No, I'm afraid there isn't. The only reason I pity those already from there is that they never get the chance to arrive.”
― Eskor David Johnson, Pay As You Go

“What's the point of your architecture or engineering degree, if you can't build a human habitat without destroying entire ecosystems of other living things! And you call yourself an engineer, an architect - a sparrow has more sense than a stupid earthling.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“The October air was crisp, brushing across the terrace, swaying the string lights above. The scent of autumn mixed with freshly brewed coffee.
Chapter 44”
― Irina Semikop, Voluntary pain

“One should not look down on this eagerness to be trendy—it belongs to the heart that is common to all. Day after day, night after night, it is this desire that holds up and sustain this city’s prosperity. This common heart, being pure and clear, is best able to take stock of the changing times. Like the evergreen, it is eternal.”
― Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

“Quebec City Castle's views:
Beautiful sunsets,
peaceful twins,
remove your headsets,
and hear the winds.”
― Jessy Ramirez

“In quantum physics, particles change when they’re observed. But this isn’t quantum: my book doesn’t alter by being seen or unseen. It is exceptional whether it reaches 100 readers or 100 million.”
― S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour, The Covert Buccaneer

“Public transport at 5am is nobody's idea of a good time, but buses in Madagascar are a whole other level of miserable. They are Spartan, to say the least. Getting a seat on these buses should be an Olympic sport”
― Misitia Ravaloson, The Eucalyptus Tree