Urban Geography Quotes

London opens to you like a novel itself. [ ... ] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand. ~ Anna Quindlen

He hands her his pack, which he's emptied. "You mean me?" Justineau demands. "You think I'm not pulling my weight?" It would feel good to have a stand-up argument with Parks right then, but he doesn't seem keen to play. "No, I didn't mean you. I meant in general." "People in general? You were being philosophical?" "I was being a grumpy bastard. It's what I wear to the office most days. I guess you probably noticed that." She hesitates, wrong-footed. She didn't think Parks was capable of self-deprecation. But then she didn't think he was capable of changing his mind. "Any more rules of engagement?" she asks him, still hurting in some obscure way, still not mollified. "How to survive when shopping? Top tips for modern urban living?" Parks gives the question more consideration than she was expecting. "Use up the last of that e-blocker," he suggests. "And don't die. ~ M.R. Carey

Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography. ~ Terry Pratchett

It is widely believed that Christianity remained an essentially urban cult and that the population of the countryside clung for generations to the old beliefs. The word `pagan' comes from paganus, or someone who lived in the countryside (pagus). Unfortunately, we know so little about the religious life in rural areas that this remains conjectural. Paganus was usually derogatory - something like `yokel' or `hick' would give the right idea - and may just reflect the common belief of urban dwellers that countrymen were dull and backward. ~ Adrian Goldsworthy

One of the most unfortunate side effects of the urban activism of the '60s and '70s is the belief that development is wrong and that fighting it makes you an environmentalist. ~ Alex Steffen

Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species. ~ David Suzuki

Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not 'broken.' Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it. ~ Diane Ravitch

The late-afternoon sky, in Paul's peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes - of nature's vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself - than of outer space, which was mostly what Paul thought of when beneath an urban sky, even in daytime, especially in Manhattan, between certain buildings, framing sunless zones of upper atmosphere, as if inviting space down to deoxygenate a city block. ~ Tao Lin

When we change the shape of the Land, we alter the contents and contexts of our collective, familial, and personal memories. Yet, stories can preserve both mythic and familiar elements of geography even when the physical features are forgotten, buried, or obliterated. And more than this: the stories can bring these elements back. If the Land can be preserved long enough for its stories to be told, and retold, perhaps we all - as custodians of both place and memory - stand a chance at real preservation. ~ Ari Berk

I don't know about the first steps in a geography of loss, and I know that it's unmapped. I know that we all have to go by ourselves. ~ Wayne Earl

You Don't Have To Be A Crook To Be Successful! ~ Latif Mercado

He found it puzzling that so many rural people were hostile to, even terrified of, the place where they lived. It wasn't just that hard-working country folk had no time for the precious concerns of the effete urban environmentalists, what amazed Rice was how you could spend your whole life physically immersed in a particular ecological system and yet remain blinded to it by superstition, tradition, prejudice. Out west, it was ranchers' holy war on predators and their veneration of Indo-European domestic animals they husbanded on land too dry to support them. Here in the Appalachians, you saw rugged country men who refused to walk in the woods all summer because they were scared of snakes. ~ James A. McLaughlin

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but. ~ John Berger

I'm thankful for the work that feminists like Gloria Steinem have done. I am a feminist, but the geography for women today is vastly different than it was in the '60s. ~ Amber Heard

Kate Daniels, deadly swordswoman and rescuer of hungry orphans. Come in. Wash your hands. ~ Ilona Andrews

In my works, the geography map-wise is accurate - roads are where I say they are, and go from this town to the next as I say they do, and yes, it would take a curricle that long to travel that distance. ~ Stephanie Laurens

The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: 'Tobacco Road', 'Abie's Irish Rose' and our old friend 'Spider-Man', which got the worst reviews in theatre history and is still apparently going strong. ~ Ben Brantley

America's last pioneers, urban nomads in search of wide open interior spaces ~ Cathleen McGuigan

What is life but a fucked-up factory fabricating fuckups? ~ Jorge Enrique Ponce

All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

For a moment, I felt sorry for him. The pain and disappointment of his life hung about him like a cloak. It permeated the air, giving him a rank and bitter scent. This, I mused, was an example of human betrayal left festering, and I felt some compassion for the man whose life had been so disturbed by his wife's ambitions and dishonesty. ~ Evette Davis

Kids in urban and rural areas face so many challenges, and they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity or extra resources to meet their needs. ~ Wendy Kopp

So confusing. It was some kind of magic, I knew that for sure, but I didn't understand the subtleties of it all. You'd have thought all those years of HBO and shit would have prepared me better. ~ Red Tash

Frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood. ~ Jane Jacobs

@K11, Urban farming; It's something nice and warm for families and kids, but also references elements of the city. Urban Farming is very important for Shanghainese people because the city has lost its connection with nature. When you buy fruit or vegetables it's just that - a product - for kids and us, we wanted to reconnect this with the amazing process of growing plants. People need this, urban farming connects people with their roots. In this way it's also educational ~ Baris Gencel

What a blessed habit I have found my prayer list, morning by morning, it takes me via the Throne of all Grace straight to the intimate personal heart of each one mentioned here, and I know that He Who is not prescribed by time and geography answers immediately. ~ Oswald Chambers

Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive - money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire. ~ James Lee Burke

I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves. ~ Moshe Safdie

Mouse isn't big. He's compactly challenged. ~ Jim Butcher

In other words, bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs. This ~ J.D. Vance

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

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets. ~ Sherman Alexie

You were supposed to be a Werewolf, Brendan, so that you would be in her world. To be the strength she needs when she no longer has strength of her own, to show her the reasons to survive and to live. ~ Elizabeth Morgan

While she wasn't looking, he subtly adjusted the erection straining against his jeans.
"How big is it?" She broke the momentary silence between them.
Wes froze. Apparently, he hadn't been as discreet as he'd thought, but he hadn't expected such a blunt ques...
"You do know the acreage of your own ranch, don't you?" she asked. ~ Kait Ballenger

Thanks, Baba. You are always such a comfort."
She gave him a wry look. "I know. I've been considering becoming a counselor. Or possibly a nurse."
Day shook his head. "If I were you, Baba Yaga, I'd stick to your day job. ~ Deborah Blake

In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe's gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.'
The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian's statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself.
'Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.'
This is poor stuff, Georgios thin ~ Ian McDonald

The farmer was and remains the stumbling block to socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and tends to live in his own house, he is less "controllable" than say, the urban dweller. ~ Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

The Council Wars era from 1983 to 1986 and the brief months from 1986 to 1987 when Mayor Washington gained control over the council were among the most dramatic periods in Chicago's history. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, and homosexuals gained real power at City Hall for the first time. Opposition to Reaganomics and support for the city as a nuclear weapons-free zone were led by the mayor and his department heads, not just opposition groups. The growth machine of the old Chicago regime, which favored urban growth focused on major public works projects and development in the downtown Loop area, was replaced by a balanced program of neighborhood, as well as downtown, economic development.33 ~ Dick Simpson

His face was a ghost story: graveyard eyes, cheekbones as sharp as urban legends, a sealed-coffin mouth. ~ Allyse Near

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies. ~ Adam Davidson

I pulled Thanos in for a kiss, surprising him. I wasn't sure if it was our bond or the fear this might be my last kiss, but I didn't hold anything back. I let him in. He took full advantage, plundering my mouth as if I were the last woman on Earth, which could have been a result of him being trapped in a desolate wasteland for the last five hundred years - but I decided not to overthink it. ~ H.D. Smith

At the end of the day, I'm very convinced that you're going to be judged on how you are as a husband and as a father and not on how many bowl games we won, ~ Urban Meyer