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895bcf0
|
There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon.
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stars
reality
night
city
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Hubert Selby Jr. |
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4739929
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Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.
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human
life
description
summer
city
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Truman Capote |
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96cbd3e
|
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
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migraine
countryside
suburbs
city
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Neil Gaiman |
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b6cb390
|
This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.
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edinburgh
intellect
city
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Alexander McCall Smith |
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c0da181
|
The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.
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|
sky
city
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Markus Zusak |
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1c531d2
|
I stood there and stared, into the sky and at the city around me. I stood, hands at my side, and I saw what had happened to me and who I was and the way things would always be for me. Truth. There was no more wishing, or wondering. I knew who I was, and what I would always do. I believed it, as my teeth touched and my eyes were overrun.
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|
truth
wondering
who-i-was
wishing
sky
city
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Markus Zusak |
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ddf3fa6
|
As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning.
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|
hope
dies
fingers
sparks
morning
sunshine
walk
running
evening
city
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Markus Zusak |
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bf9c725
|
My mouth opened. It happened. Yes, with my head thrown into the sky, I started howling. Arms stretched out next to me, I howled, and everything came out of me. Visions pored up my throat and past voices surrounded me. The sky listened. The city didn't. I didn't care. All I cared about was that I was howling so that I could hear my voice and so I would remember that the boy had intensity and something to offer. I howled, oh, so loud and desperate, telling a world that I was here and I wouldn't lie down.
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|
i-wouldn-t-lie-down
something-to-offer
desperate
howling
voices
throat
sky
intensity
visions
remember
loud
city
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Markus Zusak |
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c580de0
|
The city was dark except for the building lights that seemed to appear like sores - like bandaids had been ripped off to expose the city's skin.
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dark
expose
ripped-off
sores
lights
building
skin
city
|
Markus Zusak |
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1a84cdc
|
"Ant swarming City City full of dreams
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|
city
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Charles Baudelaire |
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834e160
|
"I waited in vain for someone like me to stand up and say that the only thing those of us who don't believe in god have to believe is in other people and that New York City is the best place there ever was for a godless person to practice her moral code. I think it has to do with the crowded sidewalks and subways. Walking to and from the hardware store requires the push and pull of selfishness and selflessness, taking turns between getting out of someone's way and them getting out of yours, waiting for a dog to move, helping a stroller up steps, protecting the eyes from runaway umbrellas. Walking in New York is a battle of the wills, a balance of aggression and kindness. I'm not saying it's always easy. The occasional "Watch where you're going, bitch" can, I admit, put a crimp in one's day. But I believe all that choreography has made me a better person. The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens, and I kept whispering under my breath "we the people, we the people" over and over again, reminding myself we're all in this together and they had as much right - exactly as much right - as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to."
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|
new-york-city
city
urban-life
|
Sarah Vowell |
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72d68bf
|
Mumbai is the sweet, sweaty smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of Gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. Its the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the island city, and the blood metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and the waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and love that produces courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches and mosques, and of hunderd bazaar devoted exclusively to perfume, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. That smell, above all things - is that what welcomes me and tells me that I have come home. Then there were people. Assamese, Jats, and Punjabis; people from Rajasthan, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu; from Pushkar, Cochin, and Konark; warrior caste, Brahmin, and untouchable; Hindi, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, Parsee, Animist; fair skin and dark, green eyes and golden brown and black; every different face and form of that extravagant variety, that incoparable beauty, India.
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|
sleep
hate
human
hope
love
smell-sea
mumbai
shantaram
colour
empire
sweat
sweet
beautiful
city
|
Gregory David Roberts |
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5091feb
|
There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.
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|
story
knew
self-contained
something-happening
household
city
|
Markus Zusak |
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679ee02
|
The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.
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|
potential
london
city
|
Hanif Kureishi |
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fc5fd5e
|
London is one of the most fascinating, historic, amazing cities in the world!
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|
town
london
city
|
Sophie Kinsella |
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d3dba15
|
I love the buildings. They're called skyscrapers. They're the closest thing to an ocean here. But it's an ocean that goes straight up, not flat out. They say that the body of water stretching away to the east of Manhattan is the ocean but it isn't. Not my ocean, anyway. It's weird because back home I just took it for granted, my grey-green sea. Now I have a granite ocean. It gives me the same happy-sad feeling I need sometimes. When I look straight up at the buildings I can feel alone in a good way. Not in that horrible way of no one knows me.
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|
sadness
happiness
skyscrapers
manhattan
home
new-york-city
ocean
city
|
Ann-Marie MacDonald |
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739c692
|
There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it... this place, she decided, was called Smog City.
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|
grief
heaven
death
kodak
kodachrome
super-8
concept
smog
steel
canada
forgotten
film
cruel
city
nostalgia
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Rebecca McNutt |
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ba31a1f
|
I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.
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|
connection
city
|
Barbara Ehrenreich |
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b30f0bc
|
"...So, um, you're from Rochester? Like, New York?" Jersey asked. "Yup, we used to live out there," Rudger confirmed, nonchalant. "You ever been?" "Naw, the closest I've ever been to there would be... well, believe it or not, New Jersey, the place where my parents named me after. It was crowded, polluted and full of crime... I loved it."
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|
travel
love
angst
urban
pollution
new-jersey
teenagers
crime
crowd
city
|
Rebecca McNutt |
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63da41c
|
He needed to get away from the rush of the city, from the unceasing noise and annoying obligations.
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|
unceasing
rush
obligations
noise
city
|
Francine Rivers |
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0795283
|
Where would tourism be without a little luxury and a taste of night life? There were several cities on Deanna, all moderate in size, but the largest was the capital, Atro City. For the connoisseur of fast-foods, Albrechts' famous hotdogs and coldcats were sold fresh from his stall (Albrecht's Takeaways) on Lupini Square. For the sake of his own mental health he had temporarily removed Hot Stuff Blend from the menu. The city was home to Atro City University, which taught everything from algebra and make-up application to advanced stamp collecting; and it was also home to the planet-famous bounty hunter - Beck the Badfeller. Beck was a legend in his own lifetime. If Deanna had any folklore, then Beck the Badfeller was one of its main features. He was the local version of Robin Hood, the Davy Crockett of Deanna. The Local rumor mill had it he was so good he could find the missing day in a leap year. Once, so the story goes, he even found a missing sock.
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|
story
life
all
and
application
atro
badfeller
beck
blend
capital
coldcats
crockett
davy
deanna
fast-foods
features
for
from
had
lifetime
local
make-up
menü
mill
moderate
once
planet-famous
size
sock
square
stall
taught
the
there
was
were
missing
year
where
he
collecting
of
hood
to
little
luxury
bounty
goes
everything
city
folklore
university
|
Christina Engela |
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834fbae
|
Building with Its Face Blown Off How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper of a second story bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had answered the explosion wearing only its striped pajamas. Some neighbors and soldiers poke around in the rubble below and stare up at the hanging staircase, the portrait of a grandfather, a door dangling from a single hinge. And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed by its uncovered ochre walls, the twisted mess of its plumbing, the sink sinking to its knees, the ripped shower curtain, the torn goldfish trailing bubbles. It's like a dollhouse view as if a child on its knees could reach in and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture. Or it might be a room on a stage in a play with no characters, no dialogue or audience, no beginning, middle, and end- just the broken furniture in the street, a shoe among the cinder blocks, a light snow still falling on a distant steeple, and people crossing a bridge that still stands. And beyong that-crows in a tree, the statue of a leader on a horse, and clouds that look like smoke, and even farther on, in another country on a blanket under a shade tree, a man pouring wine into two glasses and a woman sliding out the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.
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|
exposed
ruined
food
city
|
Billy Collins |
|
496fa0e
|
Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.
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|
dusk
gay
london
city
|
Alan Hollinghurst |
|
f0bf718
|
We are Henceforth-mongers, trying to make our Henceforth the most enticing. Because the secret of everyone who comes to London - who comes to any big city - is that they came here because they did not feel normal, back at home. The only way they will ever feel normal is if they hijack popular culture with their weirdness... and make the rest of the world suddenly wish to become as weird as them.
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|
inspirational
fame
normal
london
city
|
Caitlin Moran |