Parasitical City Dwellers Quotes

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman ... ~ Oswald Spengler

FOREST OF DOOM: This is usually the home of mobile and prehensile TREES. There will e giant SPIDERS too, and Dwellers near the centre who will want to SACRIFICE any stranger to their God. It is best to avoid the place if possible. But the Management usually insists on sending you there. An OLD RUINED CITY is sometimes situated in the heart of this Forest.
See also WOODS. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

About these homes and at the intersections of the roads in this nomadic "city" are the gardens. Each is unique. One may center around an unusually shaped stump or an arrangement of stones or a graceful bit of wood. They may contain fragrant herbs or bright flowers or any combination of plants. One notable one has at its heart a bubbling spring of steaming water. Here grow plants with fleshy leaves and exotically scented flowers, denizens of some warmer clime brought here to delight the Mountain-dwellers with their mystery. Often visitors leave gifts in the gardens when they depart, a wooden carving or a graceful pot or perhaps merely an arrangement of bright pebbles. The gardens belong to no one, and all tend them. At ~ Robin Hobb

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences. ~ James Buchan

Living in a big city can be compared to existing in a jungle. One becomes a creature of the environment. The response to the rhythms and choreography is visceral and before long a dweller's conduct is as distinctive as those of a jungle inhabitant. ~ Will Eisner

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned, months later, that they were survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine, and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year. As the kilometres wound ~ Gregory David Roberts

Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law. ~ Margaret Mead

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases. ~ Jared Diamond

Harmony with nature will bring you a happiness known to few city dwellers. In the company of other truth seekers it will be easier for you to meditate and think of God. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

He glared at me and pointed at the plate of food. "Eat. I must return to the tent and see if Hisself requires anything." He smirked and raised an eyebrow. "Simus is telling his tall tales, and those city-dwellers are believing every word. I needs get back and poke holes in the bucket he carries his conceit in. ~ Elizabeth Vaughan

Part of Wordsworth's complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not, by themselves, have eradiated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him.
The poet accused the cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall of what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire to new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder that it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. 'One thought baffled my understanding,' wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: 'How men lived even next-door neighbors, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other's names. ~ Alain De Botton

No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world. ~ Agnes Repplier

There are, in places, fallen angels
who in their iniquity and desolation
linger like a stranger on a foggy night,
sustained by the misdeeds of city-dwellers
and spurred on by bitter hatred
for their bright kin moving past them. ~ Miriam Joy

The boulderfields, the spaces empty of people--a lonesomeness city-dwellers could never comprehend. Sometimes it seems like you know animals more intimately than people. Beaver heads cutting wake in the water, bear shit jeweled with seeds, deer quenching themselves in the river's cool. Her family has lived here for three hundred years. But the place is wretchedly poor and backward and may never be right. ~ Matthew Neill Null

By the late nineteenth century, as British cities teemed with new inhabitants, crime rates rose and more established residents came to be afflicted with a new, urban, and distinctly modern anxiety. For the middle and upper classes, it centered acutely on the protection of property, coalescing in particular around city dwellers who were not members of the bourgeoisie. These included the working class, the poor, new immigrants, and Jews, all of whom were viewed increasingly as agents of social contagion - a threat in urgent need of containment. ~ Margalit Fox

If you wish your house to be well managed, imitate the Spartan Lycurgus. For as he did not fence his city with walls, but fortified the inhabitants by virtue and preserved the city always free;35 so do you not cast around (your house) a large court and raise high towers, but strengthen the dwellers by good-will and fidelity and friendship, and then nothing harmful will enter it, not even if the whole band of wickedness shall array itself against it. ~ Epictetus

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm. It ~ E.B. White

The Fence or The Ambulance

'Twas a dangerous cliff, as they freely confessed,
Though to walk near its crest was so pleasant:
But over its terrible edge there had slipped
A duke and many a peasant;
So the people said something would have to be done.
But their projects did not at all tally:
Some said, "Put a fence around the edge of the cliff"
Some, "An ambulance down in the valley."
But the cry for the ambulance carried the day.
For it spread to the neighboring city:
A fence may be useful or not, it is true,
But each heart became brimful of pity
For those who had slipped o'er that dangerous cliff,
And the dwellers in highway and alley
Gave pounds or gave pence, not to put up a fence,
But an ambulance down in the valley.
"For the cliff is alright if your careful," they said,
"and if folks even slip or are dropping,
it isn't the slipping that hurts them so much
as the shock down below-when they're stopping,"
So day after day when these mishaps occurred,
Quick forth would the rescuers sally
To pick up the victims who fell off the cliff,
With their ambulance down in the valley.
Then an old man remarked, "it's a marvel to me
that people give far more attention
to repairing results than to stopping the cause,
when they'd much better aim at prevention.
Let us stop at its source all this mischief, cried he.
"Come neighbors and frei ~ Joseph Malines

For city dwellers like me who don't get to vacation in the summer, no filmmaker can so effectively make you feel like you went to France for August, fell in love, got hurt, broke up, grew up, and figured some things out - all in 90 minutes or so. My favorite of Rohmer's cinematic escapes is 'La Collectionneuse.' ~ Jake Paltrow

If modern environmentalism continue on the current path of wilding the city, future urban dwellers might as well live in tree houses, for all the difference it will make. ~ Archimedes Muzenda

For a moment, Isabel's eyes met those of someone looking out of the window, a thin-faced woman with her hair done up in a bun. The woman began a smile, but stopped, as if conscious of somehow transgressing the conventions of isolation with which as city-dwellers we immure ourselves. The bus moved on, and zisabel felt a sudden desire to run alongside it, to wave to the woman, to aknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between them. But she did mot, necause she never acted on these impulses, and because it might have puzzled or even frightened the other woman. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

My Cape women are generally true to type - big hearted, motherly women who love the sea. My other characters, with the exception of the Portuguese, who I occasionally mention as Cape dwellers, are obviously drawn from the city types one sees in everyday life. ~ Joseph C. Lincoln

He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom. ~ Anton Chekhov

The role of the animal messenger in the dreams of modern city-dwellers is often to recall us to our wild side, and the natural path of our energy. ~ Robert Moss

Burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. ~ William Gibson

There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times. ~ Noel Perrin

1429 was a whole year long, and Paris is a big city. When in 1429, and where in Paris are two very big questions on a long list of big questions that we don't know the answers to." Funny, for a second there, I actually sounded rational and careful. As if leaping head-first into bad plans wasn't my specialty. Ringo ~ April White

I liked Edinburgh as a university in a way that I'd never enjoyed King's College London. I realised after I came to Edinburgh that perhaps it was a mistake to have gone to a college which was bang in the centre of a vast city. It had a bad effect on the social life of the students because a lot of them were commuting from outer London. ~ Peter Higgs

You forget things like how accessible the city is, I bought a bike - I haven't had a bike in twenty years. ~ Sasha Roiz

When the day comes, I'll get up at his funeral and break a giant stick. Then I'll head to a bar and spend the rest of the night drinking, laughing, crying... and waiting to die. Somebody bring a stick. - Amanda Palmer New York City June 26th, 2012 ~ C. Anthony Martignetti

New York lesson 1 - never look lost. Lesson 2 - forget hallowed silences. It's the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices. ~ Alison Fell

San Francisco was her favorite. It was the kind of city where being independent was valued, not pitied or regarded as a problem to be rectified by well-meaning friends. ~ Susan Wiggs

What if we who follow Jesus worked as one unit? What if we put aside the slight doctrinal differences, the denominational/movement mentality? What if we saw it as it truly will be one day - people of every tribe, kindred, tongue and nation united in one common cause! What if we all stood as one powerful resounding force against all oppression and wickedness and for all righteousness, peace and love. What if we were a city on a hill, a light that cannot be hidden. What if....what if? ~ David Holdsworth