Suburb Quotes

What the hell was that?" one of them asked.

"Jackal," Irene stated quietly while watching city streets turn to suburb.
They weren't taking her to a main airport but a small airstrip. One built
exclusively for private planes.

"Did she just call us jackals?" one of them joked.

Irene grinned which wiped the smile off the man's face. "No. I said the howl
you heard was jackal." She looked at Jenny. "They'll be coming for you."

Jenny glanced at the men and back at her. She looked terribly concerned she
had a lunatic in the car with her. "The jackals will be coming for me?"

"No. The wolves."

Jenny sighed. "Why oh why do I always get the nutcases?"

"Oh!" Irene pointed excitedly. "See that spot up there?"

"What about it?"

"That's where it all started. Where I crossed the Rubicon."

Exasperated, Jenny snarled, "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"It's feeding time," Irene whispered.


"That's it." Jenny threw up her hands. "We're so medicating her. ~ Shelly Laurenston

Several possibilities came to mind.
1. She was living in a suburb of the city of Utashinai on Hokkaido.
2. She had married and changed her name to 'Ito.'
3. She kept her number unlisted to protect her privacy.
4. She had died in the spring two years earlier from a virulent influenza.
There must have been any number of possibilities beside these. ~ Haruki Murakami

Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs. ~ Bill Plotkin

The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses. ~ David Riesman

I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off. ~ Fernando Pessoa

But the pop-up suburb has an incomplete feel to it like something that just wasn't right, wasn't quite real, almost like a movie set. When people raised families in that sterile environment, it produced directionless children who became directionless teenagers, then directionless adults. With no roots, no past to stand on, you got hollow kids. ~ Anne Frasier

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active. ~ Iggy Pop

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It's a house like every other house ... but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place ... and that's what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That's where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we're no longer human at all, not really. ~ Rebecca McNutt

The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle. ~ Brennan Manning

In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down. ~ Denise Levertov

The children themselves, before they get access to a car, are captives of their suburb, save for those families where the housewives surrender continuity in their own lives to chauffeur their children to lessons, doctors, and other services that could be reached via public transport in the city. ~ David Riesman

Because to Americans, Chechnya might as well be a suburb of Narnia. ~ Aasif Mandvi

At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back? ~ Jonathan Raban

But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here. ~ Katherine Dunn

We lived in a suburb of Birmingham where I attended the local state school from the age of five. I then went on to King Edward VI High School in Edgbaston, Birmingham. ~ John Vane

By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass. ~ Caroline Leavitt

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb. ~ Cynthia Ozick

He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place - in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb - to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin, at some point, to think about what to do about himself. ~ Tao Lin

Washing terror-waves round earth-globe back to suburb TV home night kitchens ~ Allen Ginsberg

I was born and raised in a suburb of Paris by a working-class family. ~ Olivier Martinez

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees - BLOOD. ~ Charles Dickens

When I was a kid, I attended a small Catholic school in a south suburb of Chicago. ~ Diablo Cody

I was husband for a week. Changed the baby's diapers. There's somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn't even know i wiped his ass ~ Keith Richards

Growing up in a New Jersey suburb, my Catholic faith was an important part of my young life, shaping the way I approached the world. ~ James Lecesne

Until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children. ~ Lev Grossman

The decision to move to the second post-college city (or suburb, or town), however, is usually made independent of friends. No matter if you do it for love, career, family, or school, the second move is on your own terms. ~ Rachel Bertsche

There is no death! What seems so is transition; this life of mortal breath is but a suburb of the life elysian, whose portal we call Death. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rio is an energetic, vibrant place, full of beauty and nature. But we face the kinds of problems any developing metropolis does - with pollution, traffic congestion, poverty. Distribution of green areas, for example, is not uniform. Madureira, the heart of the suburb in Rio, is a concrete jungle. ~ Eduardo Paes

Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows. ~ Stella Benson

Suburb: a place that isn't city, isn't country, and isn't tolerable. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

By the mid 1970s, the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers. ~ Jason Epstein

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes. ~ Stephen Hawking

I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

I realise I'm enjoying the conversation. Here in this little garden, I am able to relax. Living in my box room in
the crowded flat isn't good for contemplation. But then, who am I to complain? I can hardly afford anything else. As we listen to the hum of the London suburb and the distant sirens that cut through the city's streets all night, Ali's curious gaze fixes on my face as though he really wants to know the real me. ~ A. Zukowski

If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it. ~ Gene Luen Yang

I grew up in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in the early '90s, and hospitals and doctor's offices offered to x-ray candy. I was 7 or 8. The day after Halloween, my brother and I were sorting all of our candy, and my mom asked if she could have a piece of my gum. She put the gum in her mouth, bit down, and there was a shard of metal in it! ~ Cory Michael Smith

I was born in a suburb of Paris, and I grew up there until I was 16, so there were always a lot of barbecues, a garden, friends. ~ Vanessa Paradis

I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there. ~ Nina Bawden

I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together. ~ JR

The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hirther Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwannaland, Lhasas, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be . At any rate it out to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. (leter 53) ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else every visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years. ~ Elif Batuman

You are trying to impress someone."
Was Jared a psychic?
I told myself to keep it together. "Is that an accusation?" I deadpanned.
"Stating a matter-of-fact. Is it your unkempt Jedi Master, or the big of a hot sauce that you are dating?"
I snorted. Jared would've loved Perry. They would've fallen head over heels at each other and then started a life together with a pair of dogs and tiny house with blue roof at some suburb area. "That unkempt Jedi, and the hot sauce, they have far more authentic nickname."
"Yes." My bother nodded. "Detective Yoda and Detective Sriracha. ~ Rea Lidde

Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair. ~ Richard Brautigan

In Colma, a suburb of San Francisco, California there's a proposal pending to tax ... the dead. If proponents get their way, grave sites will be taxed $5 dollars - per grave, per year - for eternity. In Colma the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of roughly 1000-to-1, including such notables as: Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, and William Randolph Hearst. And they, apparently, haven't paid their fair share. For liberals, when it comes to taxes ... nothing is sacred. ~ Rush Limbaugh

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving's to Truman Capote's, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation's literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan's salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge. ~ Jacob M. Appel

Coogee is a delightful, slightly old-fashioned suburb; it has parks and gardens and reserves, a good well-kept beach, and an excellent promenade above the beach. It is a suburb for people who appreciate those aspects of life. ~ Richie Benaud

While chasing birds, he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable. Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoa fruit bat colonies. But when asked to name the least likable place he'd seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: Walnut Creek, no question. ~ Susan Casey

When we lived in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, my sister and I did a local play. My whole family got involved. My mom did the makeup. My sister and I were being homeschooled, and my parents wanted us to be socialized. We had a lot of fun with the other kids hanging out backstage. ~ Danielle Panabaker

The suburb was the major element of Australian society. ~ Robin Boyd

A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach. ~ Mason Cooley

Our children were mostly brought up and educated in the Churchill suburb east of Pittsburgh. Each summer, we took them back to England for an extended period. ~ John Pople

My childhood in Arlington, Va., a middle class suburb of Washington, was uneventful. Ours was a very intellectual family, and we were encouraged to read at a very early age. ~ David Gross

I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children. ~ Tracy K. Smith

The notion that we live in a quiet, ordinary suburb of the galaxy was simple and comforting.
But boy, we were wrong. ~ Michio Kaku

Every fucking suburb has a SWAT team. ~ Dave Eggers

I grew up in Louisiana - a little suburb right outside of New Orleans - and I wouldn't have it any other way! ~ Shelley Hennig

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life. ~ Alain De Botton

Okay, the question is, 'What enormously popular novel by William Peter Blatty, set in the posh Washington D.C. suburb of Georgetown, concerned the demonic possesion of a young girl?' '
'Johnny Cash', Henry replied.
'Jesus Christ!' Tricks Postino yelled. 'That's what you say to everythin! Johnny Cash, that's what you say to fuckin everythin!'
'Johnny Cash is everything,' Heny replied gravely... ~ Stephen King

I have nothing but the best memories of growing up in New Jersey. Of course, I grew up in a nice town, a suburb. But Tenafly was right next to Englewood, which had a tremendous amount of racial tension in the '60s. So I was aware of the real world. ~ Lesley Gore

I grew up in a very racially integrated place called Pottstown. It was an agricultural / industrial town which has since become a suburb of Philadelphia. I grew up basically in a black neighborhood. ~ Daryl Hall

You've got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority. That's exactly what has happened here. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I was born in Queens, New York, which is a suburb of New York City. ~ Peter Jurasik

It was a clear autumn day Sunday in 1876; Vincent van Gogh, twenty-three years old, left the English boarding school where he was teaching to give a sermon at a small Methodist church in Richmond, a humble London suburb. Standing in front of the lectern, he felt like a lost soul emerging from the dark cave in which he had been buried.

The sermon, which survives among Vincent's collected letters, reiterates universal ideas and is not an outstanding example of the art of homiletics. Nevertheless, his words grew out of his tormented life and had an intense emotional charge. Preaching to the congregation, he was also preaching to himself -- and of himself. The images he used were the same as those that were to be given powerful expression in his pictures.

The text chosen for the sermon was Psalm 119:19, 'I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy commandments from me.' ~ Albert J. Lubin

I grew up in Westlake Villiage, a suburb of L.A. There was a guy there who was a fighter and was like, 'I'll teach you to box.' I started a little bit of boxing, then it crossed over into jiu-jitsu. I was into it for a little while, but then I started doing basketball, baseball, team sports. ~ Jonathan Lipnicki

Not all superstitions are dark and cruel. I once received a communication from the god Osiris. He was living at that time in a suburb of Boston. ~ Bertrand Russell

We are just strings of quarks living in a suburb of the local density maximum of the universe. ~ John D. Barrow

Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face -- that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat -- that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real ~ G.K. Chesterton

After the war, I went to the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, a suburb of Reading. It was a big aerial system to listen to radio programmes all over the world. ~ Michael Bond

I was born in a suburb outside of Philadelphia called Lower Merion. After taking many leaves of absence, I just received my BA from NYU in Art History. I initially gravitated towards singing. Acting sort of sprang out of that as a means to participate in musicals. ~ Gideon Glick

A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible. ~ Heidi Julavits

By April 1999, the plain was nearly filled, all the way to the foothills. But the fiercely independent residents refused to incorporate. A new town would only impose new rules and new taxes. The 100,000 new arrivals filled one continuous suburb with no town center: no main street, no town hall, town library, or town name. No one was sure what to call it. Littleton is a quiet suburb south of Denver where the massacre did not actually occur. Although the name would grow synonymous with the tragedy, Columbine lies several miles west, across the South Platte River, in a different county with separate schools and law enforcement. The postal system slapped "Littleton" onto a vast tract of seven hundred square miles, stretching way up into the foothills. ~ Dave Cullen

Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the 'hood. Tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities. So long as mass drug arrests are concentrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have little reason to fear a political backlash, no matter how aggressive and warlike the efforts may ~ Michelle Alexander

My parents decided - because they were not going to teach us anything Jewish at home - to send both me and my sister to a Jewish primary school. So I went to Kerem Primary School in Hampstead Garden Suburb. But, for me, that school really didn't work that well. ~ Noreena Hertz

The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees. ~ Bill Vaughan

Now, to tell my story
if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,
I must go back sixteen years, to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway, and set forth how in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant house side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends. ~ Charles Kingsley

It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions. ~ Ed McMahon

There was only one bar of that name, in a back street of an inner suburb. I had already modified the day's schedule, cancelling my market trip to catch up on the lost sleep. I would purchase a ready-made dinner instead. I am sometimes accused of being inflexible, but I think this demonstrates an ability to adapt to even the strangest of circumstances. ~ Graeme Simsion

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Avian Influenza & Coronavirus?

With 2020 going the way it's going many people wouldn't be surprised if a T-Rex showed up in their suburb.
But one thing that is surprising is that in a few of the so called, 'Virus Hotspots', they are now playing host to Avian Influenza.
It has been proven that there is transmission of Covid-19 to animals. This is the case with domesticated cats and dogs. It has also proved the case with transmission to minks or vice-versa in Europe.
If the bird flu and coronavirus run simultaneously then there may be a common protein or gene that they both share. Otherwise why would there be a resurgence of the avian influenza.
Or it could just be a coincidence. ~ Anthony T Hincks

Pedro Algorta, a lawyer, showed me the fat dossier about the murder of two women. The double crime had been committed with a knife at the end of 1982, in a Montevideo suburb.

The accused, Alma Di Agosto, had confessed. She had been in jail more than a year, and was apparently condemned to rot there for the rest of her life.

As is the custom, the police had raped and tortured her. After a month of continuous beatings they had extracted several confessions. Alma Di Agosto's confessions did not much resemble each other, as if she had committed the same murder in many different ways. Different people appeared in each confession, picturesque phantoms without names or addresses, because the electric cattle prod turns anyone into a prolific storyteller. Furthermore, the author demonstrated the agility of an Olympic athlete, the strength of a fairground Amazon, and the dexterity of a professional matador. But the most surprising was the wealth of detail: in each confession, the accused described with millimetric precision clothing, gestures, surroundings, positions, objects.....

Alma Di Agosto was blind.
Her neighbours, who knew and loved her, were convinced she was guilty:
'Why?' asked the lawyer.
'Because the papers say so.'
'But the papers lie,' said the lawyer.
'But the radio said so too,' explained the neighbours.
'And the TV! ~ Eduardo Galeano

Hawaii's the 50th state? I thought it was a suburb of Guam. ~ Bobby Heenan

He rests in the graveyard of Ivry
a suburb that always
looks like the day
the carnival comes down.
And perhaps only I
still know
that he was alive. ~ Giuseppe Ungaretti

Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Is it not a Shame
is it not a Shame for him
So long in this Clay suburb to abide! ~ Omar Khayyam

I don't think fake people living in a fake house in a fake suburb are any less dismissible or believable than a fake psychic attending a fake school in a fake town. Nothing's inherently believable about any kind of fiction, because all of it's untrue. ~ Heidi Julavits

The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don't want to talk to a
solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's packing a couple of swords.
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just
gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a
giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.
Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a
lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can appreci ~ Neal Stephenson

As the decade wore on, Colin came to perceive the 'American dilemma' less in purely racial and legal terms, more in class and economic terms. Wherever he looked he saw legal remedies undercut by social and economic realities. . . . Only by providing jobs and other economic opportunities for the deprived - black and white alike - could the city reduce the deep sense of grievance harbored by both communities, alleviate some of the antisocial behavior grounded in such resentments, and begin to close the terrible gap between the rich and the poor, the suburb and the city, the hopeful and the hopeless. ~ Anthony Lukas

It's a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they've demolished so many landmarks. It's a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It's a strange town, it's this sprawling suburb, and then there's a city, the old town. ~ Gary Oldman

You are a Jew?' the Dalai Lama asked him. When Kevin said yes, His Holiness said, 'Judaism and Buddhism are very much alike. You should learn more about both and become a better Jew.'

I envy that. My tradition has a hard time blessing strong bonds to other traditions, especially those whose truths run counter to our own. We like people to make a conscious choice for Christ and then stay on the road they have chosen, inviting other people to join them as persuasively as they can. It is difficult to imagine a Christian minister talking to a Buddhist who has spent years studying a Christian concept and then telling him to go become a better Buddhist. In some circles, that would constitute a failure on the minister's part, a missed opportunity to save a soul. This is another way in which Buddhism and Christianity differ. Both are evangelistic - what else is a Buddhist mission doing in a suburb of Atlanta? - but the Buddhists seem to understand what Gandhi meant by the 'evangelism of the rose.' Distressed by the missionary tactics of Christians in his country, he reminded them that a rose does not have to preach. It simply spreads its fragrance, allowing people to respond as they will. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

I grew up in such a featureless, personality-less suburb. There was nothing to push against. ~ Patton Oswalt

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did - this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants - they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone… ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that ~ Christopher Hitchens

When I was 13, my family moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Florida, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend. ~ Chris Bohjalian

Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown. ~ Darin Strauss

Imagine a terrorist pointing a Buddy missile out of a bedroom window in a London suburb and blasting Her Majesty out of bed at Buckingham Palace. ~ Robert Muchamore

I was born in North Carolina but moved to a suburb just outside of Philadelphia when I was 5, so mostly grew up there. I decided I wanted to become an actor when I was 8 years old. I literally heard a friend on the playground bragging about how he was taking acting classes and thought, 'Oh! That's what I'm supposed to be doing!' ~ Sarah Steele