Urban Life Quotes

“You can't understand a city without using its public transportation system.”
― Erol Ozan

“See you later, tailgater.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“The half-mourning siren of the ambulance, like the funeral wail of the conch, upbraids the dozing guards at every door.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Non ho atteso una risposta ai miei quesiti e sono rimasta seduta dov’ero, pronta ad alzarmi e ballare da sola sul brano seguente, che mi auguravo non essere un lento. In effetti, questo è forse il più grande difetto che si potrebbe imputarmi. Mi è sempre piaciuto pensarmi legata a un passato che non ho mai conosciuto, imprigionata in un tempo che non mi appartiene, ma sono solo un’esponente della mia generazione, e la mia generazione va di fretta. I lenti, a quanto pare, non li conosce più.”
― Sara Zelda Mazzini, I Dissidenti

“Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

“I do not know whether a statue, standing in the city square for forty years and recognized by countless eyes, would feel as if it had arrived somewhere else”
― Suman Pokhrel

“The city stirred every morning teeming with people devoured by politics and people consuming politics, people shouldering responsibility and people escaping from it.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“How many birds that come at dusk to shelter themselves within its embrace, the tree standing by the roadside for forty years remembers, I do not know.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“By evening, the city sinks into slumber, exhausted and weary from its own chaos.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Street culture is a culture of containment. Most young people do not realize that it all too often leads to a “dead end”. “Street culture,” as I am using the term, is a counterforce to movement culture. Street culture in contemporary urban reality is synonymous with survival at all costs. This world view is mostly negative, because it demands constant adjustment to circumstances that are often far beyond young people’s control or understanding, such as economics, education, housing, employment, nutrition, law, and so forth.”
― Haki R. Madhubuti

“From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“You can never please humans. No matter what the weather—shine or rain—some will always complain! Humans are so hard to please that even if you grant them an eternal easy life in Paradise, some will still want to go back to Earth, even if living on Earth means struggling, starving, bleeding, and suffering!”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“A city is simply a passel of people packed in a pot like pickles.”
― David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War – A Tense Drama of Political Passions, Military Restraint, and America's First Shot

“My life had indeed become meaningless to me. Even lack of sleep was not a concern for me; only hunger remained a sensation worthy of articulation. Once that hunger was assuaged, I would return to my inert state.”
― Ashokamitran, The Ghosts of Meenambakkam

“এসো করো স্নান নবধারাজলে— বলবে কে আর?
শহরে বৃষ্টি জলকাদামাখা নোংরা দেদার,
গীতবিতানের শুকনো পাতায় বর্ষার গান
রবীন্দ্রনাথ একলা ভেজেন, আমাকে ভেজান।

নীপবন নেই, শহরে রয়েছে কড়া নলবন
সিরিয়ালে দেখা হিরো-হিরোইন সাজানো দুজন,
পেডাল নৌকো শহুরে লেকের প্রমোদতরী
এসো হে আষাঢ়, ছাতায় তোমায় বরণ করি!”
― Kabir Suman

“The city slid by — shop windows glowing, neon reflected on the glass, people in coats and holding umbrellas. Everything moved on, alive in its own rhythm — without her.
Chapter 39”
― Irina Semikop, Voluntary pain

“Cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a fear in the fabric of reality.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“We’ve built a ‘human zoo,’ caging ourselves in routines, technology, and artificial environments.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity: A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Electricity, invisible and precise, requires ugly and twisted wires that cut through the skies.”
― Paulo Ricardo Zargolin

“Monsters aren’t born. They’re made—one secret, one betrayal, one silence at a time.”
― Alonzo J. Crippen, The Monster Beside the Silence

“It's a beautiful thing watching your flawless body, dripping from sweat as you try to compose yourself while being licked, rubbed and kissed.

You moan as if you were trying to summon the strength to get one last rep in.”
― Stephen Q Gray, One Voice Of A People

“The dimly lit room only has light from an annoying alarm clock, which reminds us that it will soon be time for work.

I hit the rest button again as the thought creeps into our heads that perhaps a sick day might be in order.”
― Stephen Q. Gray

“I walked all the way home, thinking how much I loved the city, that I wanted to fill my lungs with it, because soon enough I would leave it. Not now, not in a month, but sometime, and I wanted to hold on to the feeling I had right then.”
― Tom Barbash, The Dakota Winters

“In those days the world was not a garden and the people were not idle as they are now. Then on the face of the world there was real wilderness, empty of humanity, and the wilderness that humanity created, the wilderness that it packed with itself and which it called City. People toiled and people idled and the toilers worked for themselves and yet not for themselves and the idle did no work or little work and what they did, did only for themselves; money was all-powerful then and people said they made it work for them but money cannot work, only people and machines can work.”
― Iain M. Banks, Feersum Endjinn

“WORDS IN THE PAGES &
DOODLES ON THE COVER”
― K.N.I.-fe K.N.I.-fe

“They walked east and south to neighborhoods where our city, in fields of garbage and broken brick, stands desolate, her windows burnt and blind. Here, Faith said, the people suffer and struggle, their children turn round and round in one place, growing first in beauty, then in rage.”
― Grace Paley, Later the Same Day

“[Cats and the City]
Place:
an Arab city.
Time:
the age of defeat,
a new age
of humiliation
in the twenty-first century.
General condition:
“Elegant” neighborhoods,
lavish houses
with walls
the color of graves,
beautiful gardens,
and flowers
no one dares
to smell.
Imported cars,
imported devices,
and endless shops
for every consumer good
the mind can imagine.
Between one restaurant
and the next,
a shop
for clothes and gifts.
All built
with perfect skill
upon the crust
of the same old wound,
a wound ready
to bleed profusely
at the first scratch
of a fingernail.
After walking
some distance,
the lights disappear,
the glitter disappears,
and a pitch-darkness
falls
over the city.
Suddenly,
I find myself alone,
hearing nothing
but the sound
of my footsteps,
and the meowing
of thin cats
covered in the soot
of daily life.
A desperate, miserable cat
approaches me,
begging
for its daily bread,
or perhaps
its monthly one.
I give it
a piece of my sandwich.
It takes it
and runs away quickly
to celebrate
the bite of a lifetime,
leaving me alone
in the dark,
wondering:
Which reflects
the city’s truth more,
the luxurious neighborhoods
under the lights,
or the cats
starving
in the dark?

June 8, 2014”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“and we waited for the anger to retreat
and we watched him embrace the city and the street.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Does Your House Have Lions ?

“Why do I hate cities
smelling of women and urine?”
― Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions