Selected place quotes

1. Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

2. Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession.

3. I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

4. There may not be a Heaven, but there is a San Francisco.

5. When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London.

6. Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.

7. Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

8. To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

9. It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

10. Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

11. Near the lake where drooped the willow, Long time ago!

12. There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.

13. And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.

14. My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?

15. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

16. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where 't is kept is lighter than vanity.

17. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

18. Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.

19. Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.

20. Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.

21. The garden of Eden was a boggy swamp just south of Croydon. You can see it over there.

22. Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party.

23. In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

24. You belong somewhere you feel free.

25. It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

26. Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.

27. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

28. To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

29. For some strange reason, no matter where I go, the place is always called 'here'.

30. I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

31. This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome - there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

32. 'Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power... It is a place of dreams, not only the tinseled ones...'

33. And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty's heightening.

34. Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.

35. There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.

36. 'It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime, what better place than here? What better time than now?'

37. Moscow... how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! what store of riches it imparts!

38. In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon.

39. In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace - Radiant palace - reared its head.

40. I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.

41. 'I think we shall have to give the region a name. What do you propose?' 'The Porter settled that some time ago,' said the Second Voice. 'Train for Niggle's Parish in the bay; he has shouted that for a long while now. Niggle's Parish. I sent a message to both of them to tell them.' 'What did they say?' 'They both laughed. Laughed - the Mountains rang with it!'

42. came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another (29.30)

43. Rouen! Rouen! Must I die here? Ah, Rouen, I fear you will have to suffer for my death!

44. They came to the Delectable Mountains.

45. I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way - but Bankok!

46. You stood in the belltower, But now you're gone. So who knows all the sights Of Notre Dame?

47. Oh, I'm in love With Egypt.

48. We're calling out for Middle Street.

49. East is west, up is down, and being falsely arrested for getting your C.O.'s throat cut is a simplification. I must be on Barrayar.

50. Such is the aspect of this shore; 'T is Greece, but living Greece no more! So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there.

51. 'There is a town in north Ontario / With dream comfort memory to spare / And in my mind, I still need a place to go / All my changes were there.' - 'Helpless'

52. A little piece of Aldershot in Andalucia.

53. I only exist in this place. I am only human in this place.

54. But was there really any place on earth where he could be free of this?

55. Life at Papeete soon became a burden. It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off - and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization. Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?

56. New York City's very pretty in the night-time But oh, don't you miss Soho?

57. Rome n'est plus dans Rome, elle est toute ou je suis.

58. Christopher Wren, the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: 'si monumentum requiris, circumspice'-if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose, perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance-one might even say sacredness - of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance.

59. Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, That crown the wat'ry glade.

60. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

61. 'Twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o' place.

62. Straight down the Crooked Lane, And all round the Square.

63. 'In California, you lose a point off your IQ every year.'

64. To Santa Fe Do you need it? Can you feel it in the same old way? I can feel it from the mountain top Runnin' down to the foamy brine In a rest'rant 'cross a table top Looking into a glass of wine Whispering in the evening breeze Green leaves glist'ning eucalyptus trees Can you hear them? Or get near them?

65. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place...there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. [citation needed]

66. The dress of a woman of Lhassa, in its place is an invisible element of that place made visible.

67. A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover.

68. To farm is to be placed absolutely.

69. Why don't you go back to your home on Whore Island?

70. Go fuck yourself, San Diego.

71. Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diago, which of course in German means a whale's vagina.

72. We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.

73. Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

74. I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever.

75. Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself.

76. Jagger had gone through there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed.: Somewhere that wasn't the house.:

77. In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive, The shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves, In the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices, I suddenly face you

78. Africa was a big place and would offer its own suggestions

79. This place, if I could describe this place, no place around me, there's no end to me, I don't know what it is, it isn't flesh, it doesn't end, it's like air:

80. I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere bluer than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. ...I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. ... in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.

81. Hey now! What a nutty place!

82. This is a grassy ghetto, and no home.

83. Riverside mutha fuckas.

84. The palace Beautiful.

85. At Harvey House ...

86. There are places I remember All my life though some have changed Some forever not for better Some have gone and some remain

87. 'By the Lion's Mane, a strange device,' said King Peter, 'to set a lantern here where the trees cluster so thick about it and so high above it that if it were lit it should give light to no man!' (ch. 17)

88. Everything must belong somewhere. I know that now, that's why I'm staying here.

89. 'Turns out not where, but who you're with, that really matters.'

90. Another day : San Francisco and wooden houses painted the color of children's thoughts.

91. What is patriotism? Is it love of one's birthplace, the place of childhood's recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivete, we would watch the passing clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not float so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one 'an eye should be,' piercing the very depths of our little souls?

92. It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

93. Don't send a poet to London.

94. I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. He expressed it once in this wise: - 'I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world.'

95. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.

96. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound...

97. Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces! Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb? All things are alive in your sacred walls Eternal Rome, it's only for me all is still.

98. never considered myself an outsider. But I definitely didn't consider myself an insider. (2006)

99. She's a reflection of my fascination with the diversity of America- she's totally normal in New York, but a freak in Texas. There are dozens of such clashes in America.

100. It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.