Big Cities Quotes

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means. ~ Albert Camus

Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. ~ Frank Norris

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn't get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) …
Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for 'infinite'; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren't looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man's need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego. ~ Marcelo Figueras

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely. ~ James A. Michener

The story also pointed out that most big cities and towns have chambers of commerce and economic development offices, but what makes Itasca unique, participants say, is a commitment to hard data and McKinsey-style analysis, as well as a willingness to depart from the script that drives many private sector lobbies. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

I can smell the ocean in the distance. The salt wraps around my body, making my skin feel tight, and already I want to shower. I can do big cities, and small cities, and the even the occasional mountaintop is cool. But oceans are ridiculous. They take up way too much space in this overcrowded world and are filled with creatures that have several sets of teeth, like one row of man-eating teeth isn't enough. And just to add insult to injury, all that water isn't even drinkable. If you ask me, the ocean is kind of a prick. ~ Victoria Scott

The news of the open military help to Franco from Hitler and Mussolini, and the heroic resistance of the people of Madrid, Barcelona and the big cities fired a widespread wish to help the Republic and its people. ~ Bill Alexander

People are people, and I get a bit annoyed that the music business only focuses in on the big metropolises. I find that people that don't live in big cities are just as likely to enjoy music as people that do live in big cities. ~ Eddi Reader

I bet in big cities you can walk down the street scrowling and no one will ask you what's wrong or encourage you to smile, but everyone here has the attitude that we're lucky to live in Hawaii; paradise reigns supreme. I think paradise can go fuck itself. ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I'm a country girl. The more big cities I go to, the more fashionistas and designers I meet who want to dress me, the more I have all these kind of superficial but amazing experiences, the more I just realize that I'm from Gloucestershire. ~ FKA Twigs

Watch out for dark streets in big cities because there are a lot of strange beings that hang out there at night, let alone the people. Don't you remember anything from your other lives? ~ Frederick Lenz

I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit. ~ John Lee Hooker

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter. ~ Maya Angelou

Going to New York to do whatever - show business - it just seemed fun. It seemed fun to go to the big city and meet all kinds of different people and maybe be famous. It was just exciting. So I wasn't scared. ~ January Jones

In some big cities [in Pakistan] some women have access to a job and education - but the UN reported that more than 5 million girls cannot go to school. It's become an open secret. In some big cities they build schools to deceive people around the world, while the level of education remains very low, and even when they can go to school there is no security. ~ Malalai Joya

If only I could cry. I am beyond that. The light, the light, lending itself to empty downtown Saturday, but still the stupid insensate cars flush by oblivious to their stupidity, my silent plea.
It isn't Mexico. It's not Paris. It's a painting by Hopper come to life. I am trapped inside a dead thing. Language is impossible here, even in English. Who has the arrogance to say: I'm mad, this is my crazy view of things, help me.
I'm trapped in a silent world, a tableau of forty years ago. The walls are different, the tables, the heights of the veiling and the chairs. I loom above this letter. The view past the rows of cakes in the plate glass window is unfamiliar. I am a ghost. There is nothing now between me and death. Death is the unfamiliarity of everything, the strangeness of the once familiar. The same spatial configurations only the light is hollow, sick.
I think I lack the energy to hit expensive discos which I don't know where they are to be rejected tonight. I look passable. My energy's low. I love to dance but despair is not a good muse.
This Mexico, babe. Men who don't love you but act wildly as if they do initially. Self-involved, narcissistic men... The men drink and philosophize about pain. The women live it solo and culturelessly. No one cries, except easily, sentimentally. The devil, therefore God, exists.
Oaxaca was a pushover compared to this. Pain had boundaries there.
Spare us big cities, oh lord! ~ Maryse Holder

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow. ~ Woody Allen

The two big cities of Australia are tonally as distinct from each other as Boston is from L.A. or Lyon from Marseilles. ~ Helen Garner

Certainly from the ????standpoint of a Republican, it's a winner. Republicans will come out ahead in Pennsylvania in every election. The way Democrats win, they have two big cities with huge concentrations of voters - and then overwhelm the rest of the state. All of a sudden, a Republican can win - and would probably routinely win - all but three or four congressional districts in Pennsylvania. It would turn it from a state Democrats rely on, as part of the base, to a state that they're gonna lose under almost any scenario. ~ Rick Santorum

Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city. ~ Richard Peck

This is the pattern of gun killings in big cities. Most homicides are not professional jobs, in felonious pursuits, but are committed by relatives, friends or neighbors, in the home or nearby. They are sparked by liquor, by lust, by jealousy, or greed, or a burning sense of injustice. And most are committed by people with no previous record of violence. It is these who will be restrained by stricter gun laws, who will find it much harder to go home, pick up a gun and shoot an adversary. The liquor will pass, the lust will die, reflection will replace passion if the instrument of death is not so readily available. ~ Sydney J. Harris

That's the great thing about big cities: Nobody is judging. You really get a chance to show who you are with your style. ~ Chris Paul

Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities. ~ Juan Williams

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about. ~ Salman Rushdie

Nat thought to himself that "they" were no doubt considering the problem at that very moment, but whatever "they" decided to do in London and the big cities would not help the people here, three hundred miles away. Each householder must look after his own. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

But she was Barbara Monroe, of Chicago, Illinois. She had attended a big-city high school, Mather. A big school in a big city was easier to fake than a small one, because anyone could be forgotten in a big school. ~ Laura Lippman

In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome. ~ Yann Martel

Standup keeps me grounded and keeps me in touch. I get to go from small towns to big cities, across Canada and the U.S., and you're out there and talking to people. You get a sense of what they respond to. ~ Howie Mandel

Well, I'm kind of an urban girl, I like big cities. I like New York, I like London, I like L.A. I like people, I get lonely, really, really easily. But, I think it was good, It was very different and I think that's good. ~ AnnaSophia Robb

I think the most important manner is just general kindness. When you go to big cities, sometimes people forget to just say, "Good morning," or "How are you?" ~ Jaime King

I always think that in a big city, anything is possible, including reinventing yourself. ~ Caroline Leavitt

If Tao Lin had been born to Gary Shteyngart's parents and spent his early twenties slaving for pageviews at NewYorker.com, he would have written something like this, the Bright Lights, Big City of the click-here-now generation. ~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus

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

Old Hank would be proud, and Elvis would too, cause we like our country mixed with some big city blues. ~ Hank Williams, Jr.

The fact is that automobiles no longer have a place in the big cities of our time. ~ Bertrand Delanoe

Hello, my name is Holly Eryngo Nemov. My last name is pronounced like 'Nemo', and if you spell 'Nemo' backwards, it becomes 'omen'. 'Nemov' is also an anagram for 'venom'. It also means 'nobody'. My family thought it was a good last name for me. I am fifteen years old – I'll be sixteen after October the 31st – and I'm a necromancer's apprentice. Necromancy, from the Greek words 'nekros' and 'manteia', means 'divination from the dead'. My family prayed to a demon prince a long time ago, to bring me back from that realm of the world, so I used to believe that they wanted me, but they didn't. I like reading, I like practicing magic, I like catching rattlesnakes and I like quiet, isolated places. I don't like dogs, riverbanks, big cities or survival. My family is dead, and I'm supposed to have joined the thing that killed them. ~ Rebecca McNutt

A number of studies of homeless youth in big cities put forth a startling statistic: Depending on the study, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of homeless youths identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. ~ Margot Adler

I think when you get out of the big cities people get really freaked out when they see someone who is on TV, because they're not used to that. ~ Bryan Greenberg

Today the average age of first marriage is about twenty-seven for women and twenty-nine for men, and it's around thirty for both men and women in big cities like New York and Philadelphia. ~ Aziz Ansari

The third big war will begin when the big city is burning ~ Nostradamus

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. ~ Meghan Daum

I feel lonely in big cities. Disconnected. ~ Maria Elena Sandovici

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

In the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude. ~ Vicki Baum

The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty. ~ Fritz Todt

Pizzerias in big cities benefit from Italian natives or descendants thereof, people who understand that real pizza comes from Naples where the crusts are thin and the toppings simple. Samantha's favorite was Lazio's, a hole-in-the-wall in Tribeca where the cooks yelled in Italian as they baked the crusts in brick ovens. Like most things in her life these days, Lazio's was far away. So was the pizza. The only place in Brady to get one to go was a sub shop in a cheap strip mall. Pizza Hut, along with most other national chains, had not penetrated deep into the small towns of Appalachia. ~ John Grisham

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

I loved doing Cee Lo's Bright Lights in the Big City. That was definitely a favorite of mine, because I love to get all soulful. And a close second would be Flo Rida's Right Round, because I could rap, which I've never really done before. ~ Skylar Astin

Sewage works that serve big cities run into trouble when the cities grow up around them. ~ Rose George

In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life. ~ Ernst Mayr

Most big cities like London and Glasgow have great big rivers that are unmissable. What's brilliant about the Water of Leith is that it's so hidden. It's a secret. ~ Antony Gormley

I haven't travelled that much before so this is the first time I get to see the big cities of Europe. I've never even been to US. ~ Ville Valo

I perform in opera houses in the centres of big cities. We live in 20 acres of forest. You need that space to recover and renew. ~ Sondra Radvanovsky

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance. ~ Jane Jacobs

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities ~ Karan Mahajan

All my life I have felt a great kinship with the madman and the criminal. Practically all my life I have dwelt in big cities; I am unhappy, uneasy, unless I am in a big city. My feeling for Nature is limited to water, mountain and desert. These three form a trine which is more imperative, for me, than any spiritual alimentation. But in the city I am aware of another element which is beyond all these in power of fascination: the labyrinth. To be lost in a strange city is the greatest joy I know; to become oriented is to lose everything. To me the city is crime personified, insanity personified. I feel at home. ~ Henry Miller

If you go out to some of the big cities in California, and you look at some of the monopoly situations out there, the thing is just shocking. And the tendency, and I think it's bound to be, unless it is carefully combated by those who are managing the papers, the tendency of a monopoly situation is bound to be to damp everything down to a common level. ~ Walter Millis

As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi. ~ Pankaj Mishra

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die. ~ Edward Abbey

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders. ~ Carl Sandburg

It is very seldom that any one is in prison for an ordinary crime unless early in life he entered a path that almost invariably led to the prison gate. Most of the inmates are the children of the poor. In many instances they are either orphans or half-orphans; their homes were the streets and byways of big cities, and their paths naturally and inevitably took them to their final fate. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again. ~ Iain Banks

I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston. ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

Here in the big city people spend their time thinking about work and about money; they don't give some value to friendships and it can be depressing. ~ Adriana Lima

In the United States of America there are twenty-seven million people under twenty-one years of age who receive no Christian training at all. Juvenile crime in the big cities is tremendous - sometimes it seems absolutely out of control. Every week one million people are dying without Jesus. In one minute, eighty-five people pass into eternity. In just the brief span of a church service hundreds are passing out into the presence of God. Does that mean anything to you? ~ Alan Redpath

I'd never really experienced the West before moving to Colorado. The East Coast, where I grew up, has a lot of big cities, like Boston and New York, and is more densely populated, and I instantly fell in love with the big open spaces of the West, where you can see not just for a few miles but for a few hundred miles. ~ Tyler Hamilton

Our Bar franchise program, which seeks to lift sales by targeting entrepreneurs in Brazil's slums, known as favelas. The company helps spruce up taverns and ofers management training. It's joining retailers and other businesses trying to reach out to the new middle class in Brazil's gritty neighborhoods in and around its big cities. ~ Anonymous

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again. ~ Emma Jane Unsworth

It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all. ~ Anna Godbersen

...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?
How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Most of the books that feature supernatural characters blending with the modern world and are usually set in big cities. ~ Charlaine Harris

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

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries. ~ Nora Ephron

I grew up in New Mexico, and the older I get, I have less need for contemporary culture and big cities and all the stuff we are bombarded with. I am happier at my ranch in the middle of nowhere watching a bug carry leaves across the grass, listening to silence, riding my horse, and being in open space. ~ Tom Ford

Fortunately, I had cousins who lived in Buffalo and would often go to visit them, which I loved to do because I liked Buffalo as it was a big city. Even today, the bigger the city, the better. ~ Paul Smith

In a moment when young black voters were key to the election and the reelection of a black president, when the Department of Justice has been led these years by the first two African-American attorneys general, when many big cities boast African-American league prosecutors and police chiefs and mayors, even in this moment, why is it that it still feels to so many young people that there is more power for change on the court than in the courts? ~ Melissa Harris-Perry

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget. ~ Matt Taibbi

I love Chicago. It was an awesome place to grow up. It's a big city but it doesn't feel like one. I can't imagine that if I had kids I would raise them anywhere else besides Chicago. ~ Chris McCaughan

Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming. ~ Mark Steyn

Big cities have a lot of 'younger brothers' who have left traditional parts of the world and their families for a more liberal lifestyle. But cities are filled to the gills with 'elder brothers' too. ~ Timothy Keller

Science will liberate us from the chains of big cities and lead us back to nature. ~ Lennart Meri

Nations die first in the big cities. ~ Austin O'Malley

Big cities squeeze the ability to be patient right out of people. Life becomes too frantic and rushed. It's a sad thing. ~ Deb Baker

People in my village had this mindset that in big cities like New York, if you are lost or without directions, no one will help you. The first time I came here, I tried to make sure not to walk by myself, because it would be difficult for me if I got lost. But people will help you. ~ William Kamkwamba

For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world. ~ Pankaj Mishra

The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life ~ Joseph Rykwert

My audience is, you know, pinkos in big cities. ~ Steve Earle

All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel – not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who's ever walked this beautiful green planet – how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can't disappear, it's too big. Too strong, too... permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can't pick up. ~ Jennifer Egan

You know that euphemism, she's expecting? It's apt. The birth of a baby, so long as it's healthy, is something to look forward to. It's a good thing, a big, good, huge event. And from thereon in, every good things, too," I added hurriedly, "but also, you know, first steps, first dates, first places in sack races. Kids, they graduate, they marry, they have kids themselves- in a way, you get to do everything twice. Even if our kid had problems," I supposed idiotically, "at least they wouldn't be our same old problems ... " (22) ~ Lionel Shriver

Once, I'd written a Western story, and one of the panels was just a hand holding a six-shooter, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel, and a straight horizontal line, indicating the trajectory of the bullet. So that page was sent back to me from the Code office, saying that the particular panel was too violent. I asked them what they meant, and they told me
I swear
"The puff of smoke is too big." Well, of course. So I had the artist make the smoke a little smaller, and the youth of America was saved. ~ Stan Lee

The best anti-aging advice I've ever received? Drink a lot of water and have a plant-based diet. I also do mindful meditation with my daughter every day. It takes ten minutes. I think reducing stress plays a big part in anti-aging. ~ Carolyn Murphy

I whirled round, and there on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter "W." He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought-he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. ~ Willa Cather

I'm a big fan of vampire movies generally and that sort of tradition of characters. ~ Michael Sheen

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear ... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away ... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities. ~ Umberto Eco

Brave men are a city's strongest tower of defence. ~ Alcaeus

I always say to my people, 'If you don't sell a Ferrari to a football player, you make a big present to me.' Really. Because they buy to just show off. I don't like. ~ Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo

See? If you would have gotten a dog like I told you to, you'd be one of the cool kids around here."

"And I told I work too much to have a dog. If you want a dog, you get a dog."

"I did suggest that at one point, but you said no."

"As I recall, your plan was to get a dog and keep it at my house. That would still be me getting a dog except in that scenario you would get to pick the dog. For some strange reason, that seems lose/lose to me."

"Well, obviously I'd come over whenever it needed to go out."

"How is that going to work? The club is almost an hour's drive from my house even at the best of times."

He sighed, leading the way into the great room. "You'd need to let me live in your pool house, of course."

"I don't have a pool house, or even a pool, dipshit."

He followed her inside, enjoying this conversation far too much to leave now.

"Obviously, the first part of the plan would be for you to get a pool installed, and then build a pool house for me to live in."

She frowned at him and punched him in the chest. "Your imaginary dog is already costing me an imaginary fortune."

"The upside is that imaginary dogs aren't big eaters. You're already saving a fortune on dog food. ~ Sparrow Beckett

We wouldn't even be where we are had it not been that 70% of Hispanics voted for President Obama, voted Democratic in the last election. That caused an epiphany in the Senate, that's for sure. So all of a sudden we have already passed comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. That's a big victory. ~ Barack Obama