Suburban Life Urban Quotes

With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into "the field," without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip being? Whenever we start paying attention. ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Me too, Arch," Jeremiah said. "I want an answer about my request to transfer. Even now, my balls are shrinking in anticipation of going back out in the cold. I said I'd give my life protecting humanity, but my balls were never in the bargain. ~ Rose Wynters

Getting on the bus and touring was my life. And when that was not around, I felt myself a bit lost at times, because that was all I had. ~ Keith Urban

I've always been interested in the Greek tragedies. A few years back, I re-read a translation of the 'The Oresteia,' and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form. ~ Peter Milligan

Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity. ~ Tom McDonough

Why can't I have my own life?! ~ Suzanna J. Linton

Life was not always so peaceful and rewarding at NAPA (the office). Sometime during 1968, I cam back to the office and found the plate glass window shattered. I asked Ab what happened, and he strangely knew nothing. ~ Junius Williams

Where are they now? she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the I-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories, searching for her things: She saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away. ~ Jaclyn Moriarty

Cat knew she'd arrived in Gaia's realm once she saw the Tree of Life, the foundation for all that was above and below.... The Tree of Life, no matter what religion one embraced, was a symbol of consanguinity. It was the universal representation of all that exists. Its network of connections matched that of a forest of aspen trees. Everything was interconnected and all of the roots led back to one source - the creators of all life. ~ Brynn Myers

Because otherwise you would have to let them in, let them change your life, and it's scary and unpredictable and unsafe – at least, that's what we all think. ~ Alexandra Engellmann

Hiking is like life...
You can spend the whole trip just watching the trail ahead, worrying that you'll twist an ankle or fall.
And then you miss all this. ~ Susannah Scott

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward.

Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves. ~ Ellen Datlow

Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine. ~ Sally Mann

You changed my life. You changed my ways. I don't even recognize myself these days. It must be a reflection of you, only you. ~ Keith Urban

I give you my heart, my protection, and my life. ~ Lisa Kessler

Merrie Destefano storms the world of urban fantasy with AFTERLIFE, breathing new life into the vast genre of the undead. Gritty, poignant, in the tradition of Bladerunner, with the nostalgia of New Orleans. With crisp and beautiful prose, AFTERLIFE blurs the line between the living and the dead to ask life's ultimate questions-even if they take nine lives to solve. ~ Tosca Lee

American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation.

American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders i ~ W. Scott Poole

You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary suburban homes. ~ Liane Moriarty

Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his Angels, and all his works, and all his services, and all his pride?" ...
The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ's until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, "sell" Christianity today! ... How could we then speak of "fight" when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace? ... One does not see very well where and how "fight" would fit into the weekly bulletin of a suburban parish, among all kings of counseling sessions, bake sales, and "young adult" get-togethers ...
"Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ? ~ Alexander Schmemann

But it's the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments. ~ Meghan Daum

A greater focus on design in all new homes would make the best use of land, create homes and public spaces, and reinforce the structures of urban life. ~ Richard Rogers

I've never been a believer in fate. I like to think I'm in control, that my life hasn't been plotted out ahead of time. Sometimes all it takes is one wild thought, one brave decision to change everything. This must be one of those times. ~ Kyle Richardson

Survival in more primitive ages required constant alertness, but survival in today's mechanized world almost demands that we turn off our senses. In urban life especially, there is too much to see, hear and smell. ~ Carole Katchen

Television hols up a mirror to the true nature of family life today. For the first time people see themselves reflected and refracted within its curved glass screen: helping them to define who the are and how they should behave. The introduction of the TV dinner and the TV tray means that families can now watch themselves while they eat. Behavior patterns start to undergo a radical alteration even as they are being affirmed; a rescheduling of life in the suburban living room has taken place. ~ Ken Hollings

Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world's pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of power. Impressive and popular as The Lord of the Rings is, it manages its landscapes, vast green-leaved or slag-heaped vistas of pathetic fallacy and implied morality, far better than its people; it leaves the impression that important issues have been turned by sleight of hand and Georgian prettiness into questions of good and bad practice in urban planning and rural conservation. After all, the Grail is only worth seeking if you can believe in a god who put it there to help those who help themselves, in an Avalon to which burned-out heroes can retire with dignity. There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist - the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of kind and ordinary life. ~ Roz Kaveney

Layla had always just been there. In my life. I wasn't sure who said, 'hi,' first, or maybe who smiled at who first - all I really remembered was staring at her, and her staring back at me, neither of us looking away. Both of us standing frozen, and life falling into the background with a distant hum. As if the world had stopped spinning. Just for us.
I remembered not caring if it had. She'd seemed so familiar, and even as a little kid, I'd known she was special. Like something bigger than me, older than me, had taken over my emotions in a way I didn't understand. She just felt like ... home.
I could have gazed into her eyes forever. Happy to stand in that powerless state for the rest of my life ~ Laney McMann

These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows: "My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children." On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition for work in the world and the service of God, is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. Also it is a real goal, with objective problems that a man can work at personally, and take responsibility for, and make decisions about - unlike the interpersonal relations of the corporation, or the routine of the factory job for which the worker couldn't care less.
But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal: he has the wife, the small kids, the suburban home, and the labor-saving domestic devices. How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. Perhaps the truth is, if marriage and children are the goal, a man cannot really achieve it. It is not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not justified in his work and independent in the world. Correspondingly, his wife feels justified in the small children, but does she have a man, do the children have a father, if he is running a Rat Race? Into what world do the small children g ~ Paul Goodman

Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there. Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller. Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started there for a reason and then couldn't imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it. Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you came up with not much. ~ Choire Sicha

The end is also the beginning. In order to arrive at your destiny, you must first accept the path that lies ahead. It is paved with loss, betrayal, and sorrow, but the circle is not at its end You must continue on until you find your true center and your peace. ~ Brynn Myers

And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past. ~ Richard Fortey

Lovers, even those who are married, always exist autonomously of one another, no matter how close they are or how long they've known each other. That's why jealously can flare in even the most intimate relationships.
Because you know that at some basic level this person exists separately from you. No mater how close you are, the landscape of their life is always tinted a different hue than your own. - Hunter to Joanna ~ Vicki Pettersson

I grew up in Sudan and Kenya, and lived in both the rural and urban centers of both countries throughout my life. ~ Erik Hersman

Jesus, Jess, it would be nice if you stayed out of life-and-death scenarios for five minutes. ~ Amanda Carlson

Now, over half of us live in an urban environment. My home, too, is here in the city of London. Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. It's also very sobering, and reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world.
Yet it's on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. And surely, it is our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth. ~ David Attenborough

Safe? What can be classified as safe? Everything we do in life has a risk. Just getting out of bed each morning can be dangerous. It's not a matter of what is safe, Cooper, it's a matter of what are you going to allow to hold you back." I look down at him over my shoulder and smile. "You going to let some squeaking metal hold you back? ~ Brandy Nacole

Love isn't easy. It isn't perfect like in stories or movies--but it's real. When we feel it, it reminds us we are alive, and when we truly feel it--it hurts like hell--but it reminds us why we live... For the hope of love. ~ N.A. Koziol

There are no guarantees in life, but after any major disaster two separate and distinct groups will emerge - the Prepared and the Unprepared. It's up to you which group you'll belong to. As far as I'm concerned, the ultimate measure of this book's success will be how many people it can help guide into the "Prepared group. ~ Richard Duarte

[T]he final step in becoming an urban farmer is the naming of your farm, even if your name is simply for the few pots on your front porch. Creating your name helps to build a sense of place within your neighborhood as well as pride in your accomplishments. By naming your farm you give it a life of its own. Be creative and come up with a name that inspires and makes people smile, like my friend Laura's "Wish We Had Acres," the Fairy Tale inspired "Jack's Bean Stalk" or my "Urban Farm. ~ Greg Peterson