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20792b4
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Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
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possiblity
cities
language
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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de9d462
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The city's full of people who you just see around.
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cities
strangers
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Terry Pratchett |
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54944c4
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American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.
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rubbish
trash
cities
waste
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John Steinbeck |
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53eb764
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Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.
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mankind
imagination
cities
justice
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Mark Helprin |
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c2f7d3d
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The clothes you're wearing, the room, the house, the city that you're in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there's nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.
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life
houses
masterpieces
personalities
romances
clothes
cities
pretend
wars
rooms
machines
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Alan Moore |
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858ca3a
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Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.
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freeways
southern-california
cities
places
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Thomas Pynchon |
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bf671ef
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If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has brought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.
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independence
women
francesca-lia-block
cities
new-york
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Francesca Lia Block |
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b1a01d5
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Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East's exuberant vision of the West, the West's uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna -- the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.
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cities
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M. John Harrison |
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9a47646
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Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.
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humor
cities
urban-planning
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William Gibson |
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c03c05b
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(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements--abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out...In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost.
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writing
bridges
wandering
cities
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Nick Flynn |
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1982f71
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Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.
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cities
new-york-city
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f214689
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There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall. Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in any normal, chronological sequence. My only excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal - and yet so bizarrely representative - it was like something unreal; an occasionally macabre Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real world (and the world), so much a crystallization of everything these people had managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history that it defiantly transcended everything it exemplified, and took on a single - if multifariously faceted - meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement no city in its right mind would want or be able to arrive at.
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mankind
diziet-sma
marterialist-apotheosis
multifariously-faceted
the-berlin-wall
the-west
cities
realpolitik
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Iain M. Banks |
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5b03ad3
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Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
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urban-sprawl
cities
urban-life
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Bill Bryson |
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b4cf22e
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of all the cities he had been to--Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake City--San Francisco was by far the worst.
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san-francisco
cities
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Tracy Chevalier |
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b5c073c
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...architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades...
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loss
australian-literature
landscape
cities
europe
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Tim Winton |