Urban Fairytale Quotes

You got the list?" Lewis asked.
"What the hell is the deal with the temperature?"
"Razel is not allowed to sweat," Maximo answered. "If she does,
fanatics will appear from nowhere like mischievous sprites and bottle
each drop and then sell it on eBay for millions. ~ Elizabeth Morgan

Today, as young French and Dutch Muslims wander through Upper Manhattan and Chicago's South Side, it's not uncommon to see European politicians, journalists, and activists in those same urban areas, visiting mosques and community centers trying to identify "best practices" they can take back home. ~ Hisham D. Aidi

Georgia's skin buzzed as she approached the heavy wooden doors. She swallowed hard. She didn't put much stock in church. Church was a place people went, a story people told. Most of the time, those stories didn't impress her much.
Faith, however, was another matter. Faith of any creed was sacred. Faith of every kind had power.
St. Jude was chock-full of faith. ~ Laura Oliva

It's Easy To Feel Like A Big Fish, When Your Pond is Just A Puddle! ~ Latif Mercado

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav. ~ Gary Shteyngart

She smells of her cooking and the perfume Eau d'Hadrien. My mother wore it, too. She used to cook, like Lili. Our house smelled of garlic and thyme instead of sadness. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place
an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City ... a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places. ~ Michel De Certeau

Being materialistic is part of the hip-hop community's nature, because jazz and blues and rock 'n' roll, when they started out in the urban communities, were about the American Dream, and the lack of opportunity in that structure. So they talked about everything - uplifting and getting what is perceived as success in America. ~ Russell Simmons

To implement a true urban renaissance, you first need a Grand Design elaborated by strong leadership . ~ Minoru Mori

It wasn't perfect, none of
it.
But it was a fairytale.
And people needed to believe in
fairytales. Even flawed ones.
Maybe especially flawed ones.
And they needed to believe always. ~ Kristen Ashley

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Don't pursue something with a vengeful heart, or it will destroy you. Hate wraps a cold hand around your heart and hollows you out.
- Justus ~ Dannika Dark

Luz leaned her head against the window. The bus was already on the outskirts of Mexico City and the endless urban landscape had never seemed so gray and or so harsh. Most of the city was nothing like the old money enclave of Lomas Virreyes where the Vegas lived or Polanco where the city's most expensive restaurants and clubs catered to the wealthy.
The bus passed block after block of sooty concrete cut into houses and shops and shanties and parking garages and mercados and schools and more shanties where people lived surrounded by hulks of old cars and plastic things no one bothered to throw away. Sometimes there wasn't concrete for homes, just sheets of corrugated metal and big pieces of cardboard that would last until the next rainy season. It was the detritus of millions upon millions of people who had nowhere to go and nothing to do and were angry about it.
The Reforma newspaper had reported a few weeks ago that the city's population was in excess of 28 million--more than 25 percent of the country's entire population--and Luz believed it. All of those people were clawing at each other in a huge fishbowl suspended 7500 feet above sea level, where there was never enough oxygen and the air was thin and dirty.
The city was hemmed in by mountains on all sides; mountains like Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl that sometimes spewed smoke and ash and prevented the contaminatión from cars and factories and sewers from escaping. Luz privately thought of it as la sopa-- ~ Carmen Amato

You can't escape your fate. ~ Donna Augustine

The room continued to spin though she was standing still, but her ears were hot. She felt like she'd just slammed three doubles of tequila and needed a fistfight chaser. ~ Michael R. Underwood

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time. ~ Jane Jacobs

I loved him, but he didn't want me anymore.
I suffered, and he laughed at my umanity.
This desire will be my end. ~ Sabrina Benulis

But I'll admit that he's kind of offensively delicious"
"Like salt and vinegar potato chips"
"Exactly ~ Chloe Neill

I love the beginnings of artists when all they've got is raw talent and nothing else. ~ Keith Urban

Holy shit! Can we say unstable? Was I the only sane one around here? Well, I guess that really wasn't setting the standard very high. -Ember, Darkness Of Light ~ Stacey Marie Brown

Yes," Howie said solemnly. "I can teach you how to be more 'street'".
"For God's sake…"
"Or is it 'urban'? I can't remember. Anyway, I can teach you, grasshopper. Or hip-hopper. ~ Barry Lyga

They are faithful, even if we are not. ~ Ashlee Willis

New York has been, and will continue to be, a magnet for people from all over the world. This is where the arts, business, research and technology converge to create the world's foremost urban economy. ~ Michael Bloomberg

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

We were the first urban school system in the country to wire all of our schools for the Internet. ~ Thomas Menino

One Disney "urban myth" is that in the event of a hurricane, the castle can be dismantled. That is untrue. The main building has an internal grid of steel framing, secured to a concrete foundation. The turrets and towers also have internal steel framing and were lifted by crane, then bolted permanently to the main structure. ~ Jim Korkis

Now that he was teaching Quentin could see why the faculty didn't bother trying to improve the climate. It kept people amazingly focused. ... You could actually watch as the determination to seize the moment and live life to the fullest ebbed right out of them, and they resigned themselves to lonely, silent, indoor study instead. ~ Lev Grossman

Two years, I thought. Two years living wrapped in vicious guilt, self-doubt, and rage. No truth to salve the wounds, only the steady application of alcohol. But now Books, and now this mystery man. The self-doubt vanished. The guilt and rage remained. ~ David Grant Urban

My Friends I Will Always Remember, And My Enemies I Will Never Forget! ~ Latif Mercado

The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety - dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull. ~ Rem Koolhaas

I'll email you, he says as if he's asking me into the cellar to taste his vintage champagne. ~ Poppet

For all the successes of Western civilization, the world paid a dear price in terms of the most crucial component of existence - the human spirit. The shadow side of high technology - modern warfare and thoughtless homicide and suicide, urban blight, ecological mayhem, cataclysmic climate change, polarization of economic resources - is bad enough. Much worse, our focus on exponential progress in science and technology has left many of us relatively bereft in the realm of meaning and joy, and of knowing how our lives fit into the grand scheme of existence for all eternity. ~ Eben Alexander

The stranded Daoine Sidhe knights of the Dark Court gathered at the ring of ancient standing stones under the pale light of the harvest moon.
Whenever the Daoine Sidhe gathered, they raised the natural energies of the world around them. ~ Thea Harrison

I try to encourage young people to follow their dreams. Even if you're born in an urban community it's always something available to you whether it be a dance class or whether you do really good in school and you can get a scholarship. So if you just put your mind to it and if you educate people enough and they know that they can find resources to help them get to where they need to go then that's really important. ~ Adrienne Bailon

There is no ready vocabulary to describe the ways in which artists become artists, no recognition that artists must learn to be who they are (even as they cannot help being who they are.) We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells to art?

"Artists come together with the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share. The message across time from the painted bison and the carved ivory seal speaks not of the differences between the makers of that art and ourselves, but of the similarities. Today these similarities lay hidden beneath urban complexity -- audience, critics, economics, trivia -- in a self-conscious world. Only in those moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art. The rest may be necessary, but it's not art. Your job is to draw a line from your art to your life that is straight and clear. ~ David Bayles

He was like something out of a fairytale or a myth, the last of his breed in a world that was writing the last page of its book. ~ Stephen King

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island. ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

And the space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed - provided you have the money. ~ Alessandro Busà

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The love has got to be bigger than everything else. The isolation, the separation, the danger. When the love is bigger than all of that – you just do it. You pay the price in uncertainty and sometimes bereavement, because every moment you're together is worth the cost. ~ Thea Harrison