Urban Space Quotes

I wanted to improve the suburban office building; to create a great urban space in a suburban environment with all that implies about interaction, collaboration and creativity. ~ Helmut Jahn

The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all ... There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything. ~ Michel De Certeau

Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there. ~ Alex Steffen

In its revolt against congestion and sordor, a space-hungry generation has, I fear, developed eyes that are bigger than its stomach. ~ Lewis Mumford

The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own. ~ Peter De Vries

I had some pretty lucky and good living situations; thankfully I never got forced out of an apartment. A lot of my friends got evicted or pushed out and couldn't afford a new place. For me, I wanted more space to set up a home studio, but there was no way to afford that. ~ Mikal Cronin

The hygienic slickness of our contemporary films, be they from Hollywood, Paris, or Sweden, is a contagious sickness that seems to be catching through space and time. Nobody seems to be learning anything, either from Lumière or from the neorealists: Nobody seems to realize that the quality of photography in cinema is as important as its content, its ideas, its actors. It is photography that is the midwife, that carries life from the street to the screen, and it depends on photography whether this life will arrive on the screen still alive. ~ Jonas Mekas

My soul is an entangled knot,
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
And thine doth like a convict sit,
With marline-spike untwisting it,
Only to find its knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for its untying
In four-dimensional space are lying,
Wherein they fancy intersperses
Long avenues of universes,
While Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one finite, unbounded homoloid,
And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

One of the key principles of the Outer Space Treaty is that space is the common heritage of humanity and cannot be owned by anyone – government, nation, individual or corporation. Space is very colonial: we talk of the 'conquest' of space, the 'high frontier' or the 'final frontier', colonising other planets, and the innate urge of human beings to explore, often without thinking about it; it's such a strong master narrative. Instead of considering the treaty to be outdated, we might equally think of it as a radical statement of equality and justice – and one we need more than ever. ~ Alice Gorman

No one is longing to meet a desperate needy, angry, withholding, controlling person. If your beloved is out there they can't pick up your signals if you're dwelling in those spaces within yourself. ~ Marianne Williamson

I like my surroundings to be pretty spare and severe. It helps me to concentrate on my work. All I ever do here is go from my studio to my bedroom. Everything else is extraneous. I never entertain, because to me, New York is about meeting people in public spaces, absorbing a little bit of their energy. ~ Ross Bleckner

If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God. ~ Ken Wilber

In my experience, directors who are the most comfortable with themselves and confident in their work give you and everybody on the crew the freedom and the space to create. It's the people who are more insecure who feel the need to control and micromanage. ~ Sarah Gadon

The reason is that the English language treats a changing entity (a loaded wagon, sprayed roses, a painted door) in the same way that it treats a moving entity (pitched hay, sprayed water, slopped paint). A state is conceived as a location in a space of possible states, and change is equated with moving from one location to another in that state-space. In this way, locative constructions illustrate a second discovery in the hidden world down the rabbit hole, the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language. ~ Steven Pinker

Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. ~ Aldous Huxley

When you battle for something it is like you are trying to push your realization into the alternatives space, whereas when you choose something the space comes to you. ~ Vadim Zeland

Philip obliged, opening his left hand, palm upwards, and forcing his energy into the creation of an orb of light, formed, tangible, and alive. The small suns Philip could create out of nothing, were miniatures of the original, with molten plasma lying almost invisible at their cores, obscured by the bright rays of light emitted from them, making them seem harmless. ~ D.M. Enslin

Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing,
we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really
existing too. ~ Brian Greene

The mind leaps, and leaps perhaps with a sort of elation, through the immensities of space, but the spirit, frightened and cold, longs to have once more above its head the inverted bowl beyond which may lie whatever paradise its desires may create. ~ Joseph Wood Krutch

Dengar guffaws. "You little scrap-muncher. I was putting away bounties while you were still in your space diapers." "What's it say about you that you're still in your space diapers? ~ Chuck Wendig

When everything that ticked has stopped, and space stares, all around, or grisly frosts, first autumn morns, repeal the beating ground. ~ Emily Dickinson

Suddenly we were in outer space. Aboard a rusty old piece of junk freighter. Far away. And in real trouble. ~ Jonathan Maberry

More bungalow-type setups. Rent by the week. Artsy places," Zane
explained. "It's different."
"Do I look like an artsy type to you?" Ty asked, bristling on principle.
It didn't even faze Zane. "You look like sex on legs to me. You'll
blend in, no problem. ~ Madeleine Urban

David Henderson's 1970 poem "Keep on Pushing," also analyzed the geographies of urban warfare in the Summer of 1964's Harlem Riots. Henderson warned of the crude mathematics of wide avenues that can swallow protest pickets, easily dismantle popular barricades, and muster five hundred cops in fifteen minutes, but he also suggests how, "For Harlem/ reinforcements come from the Bronx / just over the three-borough Bridge. / a shot a cry a rumor / can muster five hundred Negroes / from idle and strategic street corners / bars stoops hallways windows. ~ Anonymous

It's beyond imagination until you actually get up and see it and experience it and feel it. ~ William C. McCool

In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library. ~ Anne Lamott

Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight against fanaticism needed visible faces, audible voices. He would be quiet no longer. He would try to become a loud and visible man. ~ Salman Rushdie

I thought of the three men in the meadow. None were what they seemed and I was in the arms of my worst enemy, taking comfort from him. Would my life ever be normal?
"Normal is boring," Mace said. ~ H.D. Smith

Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations. ~ Walker Percy

The inspiration of a noble cause involving human interests wide and far, enables men to do things they did not dream themselves capable of before, and which they were not capable of alone. The consciousness of belonging, vitally, to something beyond individuality; of being part of a personality that reaches we know not where, in space and time, greatens the heart to the limit of the souls ideal, and builds out the supreme character. ~ Joshua Chamberlain

space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

My body felt alive.
I need more.
"Valkyrie," Fen growled, eyes locked on my mouth. "Put your lips back on mine, and I will give you what you crave. ~ Amanda Carlson

We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed. ~ Lawrence Durrell

The body is a vehicle for the mind, and that vehicle is how you travel through space. ~ RZA

I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space? ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I'm not saying a hunt isn't something we crave, but to a man, we hate to be manipulated. And this is our town, as much as any human's. Our home, and our neighbours and perhaps even our friends. You fall into the trap of thinking as Fallon does, that there are only heroes and villains, monsters and victims, and nothing between. We all stand in that space, crossing the line to one side, then the other. Even you. ~ Rachel Caine