Living In A City Quotes

There's nothing better about living in a farm than living in a city. You can't just go sit in a pretty landscape and bet on it changing you into a better person. ~ Catherine Lacey

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. ~ Olivia Laing

The New Your energy goes beyond anything you'll find anywhere else. It's too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us. ~ Lawrence Block

One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city
as I once did for a couple of years. ~ Edward Abbey

The Art of a Relationship Living in a city is an art, not a science. Choosing to live in a city is choosing to enter into a relationship with it. And, like any human relationship, the relationship you have with your city is one that requires nurturing, constant practice and work. ~ The School Of Life

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else's tragedy - drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall - but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you. Most of all, to your child. ~ Liane Moriarty

Because the quality of living with nature and allowing it to manifest itself is different than the quality of living in a city, especially a dense city. ~ Lawrence Halprin

Do you know where 'policeman' comes from, sir? ... 'Polis' used to mean 'city', said Carrot. That's what policeman means: 'a man for the city'. Not many people knew that. The word 'polite' comes from 'polis', too. It used to mean the proper behaviour from someone living in a city. ~ Terry Pratchett

I shook my head. "it's not about living in a city."
It wasn't. Back then, it wasn't just getting away. It was about not coming back. It wasn't just the size and sensibility of this place that made in unbearable, but its pull - the weird magnetism that could sap your ambition, clip your wings, leave you inert and fascinated and sinking ever deeper into the choking quicksand of small-town life. ~ Kat Rosenfield

The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce. And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future, and that's what I've done. ~ Wendy Davis

I keep a pretty low profile. I live in Culver City with some roommates. I don't do the whole 'Hollywood' thing. ~ Cory Monteith

We can combat existential anguish – the unbearable lightness of our being – in a variety of ways. We can choose to work, play, destroy, or create. We can allow a variety of cultural factors or other people to define who we are, or we can create a self-definition. We decide what to monitor in the environment. We regulate how much attention we pay to nature, other people, or the self. We can watch and comment upon current cultural events and worldly happenings or withdraw and ignore the external world. We can drink alcohol, dabble with recreational drugs, play videogames, or watch television, films, and sporting events. We can travel, go on nature walks, camp, fish, and hunt, climb mountains, or take whitewater-rafting trips. We can build, paint, sing, create music, write poetry, or read and write books. We can cook, barbeque, eat fine cuisine at restaurants or go on fasts. We can attend church services, worship and pray, or chose to embrace agnosticism or atheism. We can belong to charitable organizations or political parties. We can actively or passively support or oppose social and ecological causes. We can share time with family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances or live alone and eschew social intermixing. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

As a spirit having a human experience, you can choose to not merely exist but to be fully conscious and aware of living in a limited world. When you take a conscious part in life and its multitudes of choices, you won't let life happen to you - you will make life happen for you. ~ James Van Praagh

By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

For many people, a western lifestyle equates to living in a toxic home, working a toxic job, eating toxic food, being sick from your thirties onward and eventually dying from preventable disease. ~ Steven Magee

This is a living planet. Look around. Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Look beyond our solar system. Where else is there a place that works, that is just right for the likes of us? It has not happened just instantly. It is vulnerable to our actions. But it's the result of four and a half billion years of evolution, of change over time. And it changes every day, all the time. It would be in our interest to try to maintain a certain level of stability that has enabled us to prosper, to not wreck the very systems that give us life. ~ Sylvia Earle

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. ~ Charles Darwin

We're living under the Obama economy. Any CEO in America with a record like this after three years on the job would be graciously shown the door. This president blames the managers instead. He blames the folks on the shop floor. He blames the weather. ~ Mitch McConnell

We plunge ourselves into enormous debt and then take two and three jobs to stay afloat. We uproot our families with unnecessary moves just so we can have a more prestigious house. We grasp and grab and never have enough. And most destructive of all, our flashy cars and sports spectaculars and backyard pools have a way of crowding out much interest in civil rights or inner city poverty or the starved masses of India. Greed has a way of severing the cords of compassion. Richard J. Foster, 1981 ~ Catherine Whitmire

It was a real treat when he'd read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we'd reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight choice between him and Henry James, I'd have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either. ~ Angela Carter

This room is crowded, haunted by the stale breath of the living. Until now, I have been able to imagine him dead, gloriously rotting in soil, on his way to Hell, perhaps, or stuck in the mire of nothingness that catches wandering spirits. In that image I have found small degrees of warmth, a tangible explanation for not knowing my father.

I look at the picture and enlarge it with my mind. It is impossible to sleep knowing the chance exists that I might still meet him. I feel the planet spinning under me, like a whirlpool, the surface shrinking so that everything must eventually touch. I resist until it shatters. ~ Laurie Perez

And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that? ~ Sylvia Brownrigg

Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino ~ Italo Calvino

Know for a certainty that if men understood how terrible is even one solitary sin, they would rather be cast into a heated furnace, and there remain, living both in soul and body, than to support such a sight. And if the sea were all fire they would cast themselves therein and never leave it, if they were certain of meeting the sin on doing so. ~ Catherine Of Genoa

Absolutely, it's a Sunni area. So the key here, once Ramadi is taken that you have the Sunni tribal fighters, Sunni police in there patrolling the city. ~ Tom Bowman

I am married to a girl from Hamburg, so no one need tell me about the dangers of living in a German dominated household. ~ Nigel Farage

As soon as the period of mourning for Dona Ester was over and the big house on the corner was finished, Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle were married in a modest ceremony. Esteban gave his wife a set of diamond jewelry, which she thought beautiful. She packed it away in a shoe box and quickly forgot where she had put it. They spent their honeymoon in Italy and two days after they were on the boat. Esteban was as madly in love as an adolescent, despite the fact that the movement of the ship made Clara uncontrollably ill and the tight quarters gave her asthma. Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compress to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy and desired her with unjust intensity considering the wretched state to which she was reduced. On the fourth day at sea, she woke up feeling better and they went out on deck to look at the sea. Seeing her with her wind-reddened nose, and laughing at the slightest provocation, Esteban swore that sooner or later she would come to love him as he needed to be loved, even if it meant he had to resort to extreme measures. He realized that Clara did not belong to him and that if she continued living in her world of apparitions, three-legged chairs that moved of their own volition, and cards that spelled out the future, she probably never would. Clara's impudent and nonchalant sensuality was also not enough for him. He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and ~ Isabel Allende

I have heard that sometimes when a person has an operation to transplant someone else's heart or liver or kidney into his body, his tastes in foods change, or his favorite colors, as if the organ has brought with it some memory of its life before, as if it holds within it a whole past that must find a place within its new host. This is the way I carry Lexy inside me. Since the moment she took up residency within me, she has lent her own color to the way I see and hear and taste, so that by now I can barely distinguish between the world as it seemed before and the way it seems now. I cannot say what air tasted like before I knew her or how the city smelled as I walked its streets at night. I have only one tongue in my head and one pair of eyes, and I stopped being able to trust them a long time ago. ~ Carolyn Parkhurst

I feel like my job is to give hope. The world is in a dark place and we are living in somewhat of a nightmare. So I want to make films to give hope. ~ Hany Abu-Assad

As a British person living in the USA, I keep a low profile on Independence Day, July 4th. ~ Steven Magee

The unexamined life is eminently worth living, were anyone so fortunate. It would be the life of an animal, brave and alert, with instincts instead of opinions and decisions, loyalty to mate and cubs, to the pack. It might, for all we know, be a life of richest interest and happiness. Dogs dream. The quickened spirit of the eagle circling in high cold air is beyond our imagination. The placidity of cattle shames the Stoic, and what critic has the acumen of a cat? We have used the majesty of the lion as a symbol of royalty, the wide-eyed stare of owls for wisdom, the mild beauty of the dove for the spirit of God. ~ Guy Davenport

Worse, in the video for it (which is also played everywhere constantly), Boris is singing to a girl who is dying in a hospital bed, and Boris is telling her (lyrically) that he'll give her a million stars (plus his love) if she'll find the strength within herself to not die, and love him forever.
Of course the girl is so moved by this hot rocker dude's amazing song that she doesn't die. Because it is a medical fact that people with fatal diseases only need a hot rocker dude to sit on the edge of their hospital bed and sing them a rock ballad in order to give them the strength to go on living. ~ Meg Cabot

Each of us is free to move our consciousness through that infinite pattern of possibilities as we please. If we're filled with fears, or if we trust the fears of others, we'll choose a path in which our city falls into the sea, or a path in which a third world war vaporizes us, or whatever other disaster is most thrilling or horrifying or fascinating for us. ~ Richard Bach

Your daughter is gay? Where are all these gay people coming from? Gay friends. Gay daughters of friends. Gay sisters-in-law. Gay suspects. I ask one guy for a kiss and suddenly I'm living in Ancient Greece. ~ Dani Alexander

As to the latter point - that by having a child in America you are somehow starving a child in Bangladesh - remember that agricultural economics is not a zero-sum game. Farmers want to make a living, so as demand increases, so does production. Not only that, but agricultural productivity has increased so rapidly that in some countries the government pays farmers not to plant crops in an effort to keep food prices from dropping. ~ J. Budziszewski

I want to write a song for someone who has just fallen in love or someone single and living their live. ~ Taylor Swift

I've got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don't give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I'm no saint, the way you kid about. But I've always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It's a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You're always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don't just step off and walk in the cool grass. ~ Dean Koontz

Outside, on Park Avenue, the people had begun to move along the sidewalks once more, the streets of the city began to fill and thicken. Upon the table by her bed the little clock ticked eagerly it's pulse of time as if it hurried toward some imagined joy, and a clock struck slowly in the house with a measured, solemn chime. The morning sun steeped each object in her room with causal light, and in her heard she said, "It is now". ~ Thomas Wolfe

Everything about her is disastrous. She's nothing more than a mess."
"And yet?" he urged me on.
And yet, I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be an odd character, a freak of nature. I wanted to stumble and laugh out loud. I wanted to find her beautiful disaster and mix it together with my own mess. I wanted the freedom she swam in, and her fearlessness of living in the moment.
I wanted to know what it meant to be a part of her world.
To be a man who felt everything.
I wanted to hold her, but still have her move freely in my arms. I wanted to taste her lips and breathe in a part of her soul as I gave her a glimpse of mine.
I didn't want to be her friend – now.
I wanted to be so much more. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

Hawke continued to walk beside his lieutenant - a man who, as a result of his incredible feats during the battle in San Francisco, now had a fan club. Complete with "I (heart) Judd" and "Judd Is My Boyfriend" memorabilia. In the normal course of events, civilians wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the former Arrow, but it had been impossible to evacuate the entire city prior to the Pure Psy attack. ~ Nalini Singh

We often talk about being kind, but how do we define "kind" at its very root? Where is the root and what is the root of "kind" and "kindness"? I truly believe that kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the flaws of life, the acceptance of the turns life has taken which we couldn't have planned for and that we didn't hope for. Kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the fact that life is a wild thing that cannot ever be caged. Some people are going to get married and divorced seven times before they find the one they are meant to be with; that's okay. Some people are going to be born with disabilities; that's okay. Some people are born in heaven while others are born in hell; both are okay. Some people are born in hell later ending up in heaven while others are born in heaven later ending up in hell; it's all okay. Life, whether belonging to you or to others, is never going to be a painting fitting into your prepared picture frame. How dare we come into this monstrous, joyous, incredible, terrible world, thinking that we can dictate what's wrong and right, what's better and what's lesser? Come into this world with your wings and your claws and your paws and your laughters! With your feathers and your fur! Because you're going to need all of it! And when you look at other people, sometimes they are going to be donning feathers and other times they are going to be clawing things, jumping in and out, screaming or laughing or crying or being quiet; it's all okay. Because we are ~ C. JoyBell C.

Live a life abundant in love and rich in spirit, these are the seeds of a fulfilling existence. Be the safe harbor you seek in the world. Follow your dreams, not your fear.
Go into the New Year with an open mind and hopeful heart. Don't let the chains of unforgiveness weigh you down. Life is too short to live in a prison of past hurts. The futures is yours for the taking and creating.
Life is bittersweet, when we can let darkness and light co-exist as illumination, we can live in true happiness. When we live life at its best, it is a symphony of feelings, of high and low notes, of tragedy and comedy, love and loss, magic and the sublime. It can be quite a spectacular journey when we fully embrace and accept it. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

After the Jews crossed the sea and the desert, they reached the Promised Land. Scouts were sent to look at the land before settling. When the scouts came back, they reported that the people in the land were giants. "We looked at them and they looked at us as if we were grasshoppers," they said.
Sometimes when we make a decision to make a change in our lives, we feel just like those scouts. However, if you pay attention to the words of the Bible, it was not the giants living in the land of Israel who believed that the Jews looked like grasshoppers. It was the Jews' own perception. When they looked at the giants, they believed they were the grasshoppers. ~ Celso Cukierkorn

Billy sipped the last of his coffee from the mug and shut down his laptop. 1,000 words wasn't great but it also wasn't as bad as no words at all. It hadn't exactly been a great couple of years and the royalties from his first few books were only going to hold out so much longer. Even if he didn't have anything else to worry about there was always Sara to consider. Sara with her big blue eyes so like her mother's.
He sat for a moment longer thinking about his daughter and all they'd been through since Wendy had passed. Then he picked up his mug with a long sigh and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it in the sink.
When he came back into his little living room and the quiet of 1 AM he wasn't surprised to find her there over to the side of the bookshelf hovering close to the floor just beyond the couch.
Wendy.
Her eyes were cold and intense in death, angry and spiteful in a way he'd never seen them when she was alive. What once had been beautiful was now a horror and a threat, one that he'd known far too well in the years since she'd died. He and Sara both.
He stood where he was looking at her as she glared up at him. Part of her smaller vantage point was caused by kneeling next to the shelf but he knew from the many times she'd walked or run through a room that death had also reduced her, made her no higher than 4 or 4 and half feet when she'd been 6 in life. She was like a child trapped there on the cusp between youth and coming adulthood. Crushe ~ Amanda M. Lyons

There are two ways by which one will realize the life's goal. If we have not met a Gnani Purush, then we should live life in such a way, that we hurt no one. Our highest goal should be to not hurt any living being in the slightest. The other way is if you encounter the Gnani Purush, then you should remain in the Gnani's satsang. In doing so, all your work will be accomplished. All the 'puzzles' will be solved. ~ Dada Bhagwan

The documents inbox138 described a world in which money was everything- not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose of living it. ... If that was how the old world worked--if that was all they really cared about--maybe it was better that it had fallen apart. Maybe it was inevitable ~ Dan Wells

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it. ~ Dodie Smith

Wolves, declared the document, like all other wildlife "have a right to exist in a wild state," one that "derives from the right of all living creatures to co-exist with man as part of natural ecosystems. ~ Bruce Hampton

Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons. ~ Rollo May

Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles. Because we are all, every one of us, living on a round rock that spins around and around at almost a quarter of a million miles per hour in an unthinkably vast blackness called space. There is nothing else like us for as far as our telescopic eyes can see. In a universe filled with spinning, barren rocks, frozen gas, ice, dust, and radiation, we live on a planet filled with soft, green leaves and salty oceans and honey made from bees, which themselves live within geometrically complex and perfect structures of their own architecture and creation. In our trees are birds whose songs are as complex and nuanced as Beethoven's greatest sonatas. And despite the wild, endless spinning of our planet and its never-ending orbit around the sun–itself a star on fire–when we pour water into a glass, the water stays in the glass. All of these are miracles. ~ Augusten Burroughs

Are we comfortable as a nation to see a huge increase in millionaires and billionaires but have more people living in austerity than ever? ~ Fuad Alakbarov

For students who have not been required to confess that it is easier to learn theology then live it, it is tempting to think maturity is more a matter of knowing in a matter of living ~ Paul David Tripp

Depending on each other and facing the difficulties that go with it takes a lot more effort than living on your own, separated from the rest of the world. Loving each other, hurting each other, over and over, until our death. All those things that seem so normal are actually incredibly difficult. To accomplish a normal life might be an achievement as great as writing a book that goes down in history! ~ Naoyuki Ochiai

In the whole vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die, and how many are killed. But from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power of violence at once hidden and palpable … has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. Thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself, he kills in order to attack, and he kills in order to defend himself. He kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself. He kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him.

From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound ... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses ... And who in all of this wil ~ Joseph De Maistre