53 Urban life Quotes

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.

The street's alive as secret debts are paid, Contacts made, they vanished unseen. Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades Hustling for the record machine. The hungry and the hunted explode into rock'n'roll bands That face off against each other out in the street, down in Jungleland.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee.

If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.

What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.

My heart has become as hard as a city street, The horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, All day long and all night long they beat, They ring like the hooves of time.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. All dwellers in cities must dwell with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

'There is no VIP room in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can't Google the answer.'[citation needed]

Let but thy wicked men from out thee go, And all the fools that crowd thee so, Even thou, who dost thy millions boast, A village less than Islington wilt grow, A solitude almost.

'Oh, dear no, miss,' he said. 'This is a London particular.' I had never heard of such a thing. 'A fog, miss,' said the young gentleman. 'Oh, indeed!' said I.

My heart is torn with the sound of raucous voices, They shout from the slums, from the streets, from the crowded places, And tunes from the hurdy-gurdy that coldly rejoices Shoot arrows into my heart.

Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of this century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city's inchoate density is a special challenge.

It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.

Still prowling around. Mid-afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace facade. They hang there like an idee fixe in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud.

Before the ferry leaves a horse and wagon comes aboard, a brokendown springwagon loaded with flowers, driven by a little brown man with high cheekbones. Jimmy Herf walks around it; behind the drooping horse with haunches like a hatrack the little warped wagon is unexpectedly merry, stacked with pots of scarlet and pink geraniums, carnations, alyssum, forced roses, blue lobelia. A rich smell of maytime earth comes from it, of wet flowerpots and greenhouses. The driver sits hunched with his hat over his eyes. Jimmy has an impulse to ask him where he is going with all of those flowers, but he stifles it. (p. 403)

[T]he ideal of the rugged individual opening up the American West is still applied as an essential truth to ten million citizens living in the small area of New York City, as if ten million bulls should and could be squeezed into a china shop.

When Dawn strides out to wake a dewy farm Across green fields and yellow hills of hay The little twittering birds laugh in his way And poise triumphant on his shining arm. He bears a sword of flame but not to harm The wakened life that feels his quickening sway And barnyard voices shrilling 'It is day!' Take by his grace a new and alien charm. But in the city, like a wounded thing That limps to cover from the angry chase, He steals down streets where sickly arc-lights sing, And wanly mock his young and shameful face; And tiny gongs with cruel fervor ring In many a high and dreary sleeping place.

O early one morning I walked out like Agag, Early one morning to walk through the fire Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire.

De Niro's inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He's Travis Bickle, an outsider who can't find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can't sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted - whores, pimps, transients - he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Martin Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness.

Thinking hard about you I got on the bus and paid 30 cents car fare and asked the driver for two transfers before discovering that I was alone.

Restless sleep twisted dreams. Moving targets silent screams. Restless city restless street. Restless you restless me.

The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit.

Lives there a man whose sole delights Are trivial pomp and city noise, Hardening a heart that loathes or slights What every natural heart enjoys?

'I don't mean any disrespect. I truly don't. But Texas isn't nature. Texas is city and smog and humidity and heat.'

There are few cities with so many good as New Orleans and also few cities where there is such a stark coexistence with the bad. It is this city, the Big Easy, that is home to kind and generous and Christian people . . . and yet also this city that has allowed evil to flourish in a way that has become truly dangerous.

'It's a very treacherous city. A lot of people are afraid of it and a lot of people enjoy it. The ones who are afraid of it can't cope and the ones who enjoy it get off on tension. I get off on the place, but only for so long, cause I hate fuckin' walkin' and I don't like the cab drivers, the roads are bumpy, the people... The bitches there are so tough, you score one of those girls, take her to bed, you squirt, she hasn't come yet and you're dodgin' punches because you came too fast...' -on visiting New York City

It's like a ghetto we can never leave/A broken rose givin bloom to the cracks of the concrete

In Stadten glaubt man, es gehore zum guten Tone, nicht einmal zu wissen, wer in demselben Hause wohnt.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.

This may be why New Yorkers instinctively avoid making eye contact with each other in crowded places, why they 'look right through you,' as dismayed visitors often complain. They are not looking right through you at all; they are discreetly avoiding an intrusion into your space. They sense the danger in a place where a one-degree temperature rise can mean an explosion.

The greenish sky glows up in misty reds, The purple shadows turn to brick and stone, The dreams wear thin, men turn upon their beds, And hear the milk-cart jangle by alone.

By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on the escargots. On New York's East Side one occasionally meets a person so palpably evil as to be fascinatingly irresistible. There is a smell of power and danger on these people, and one may be horrified, exhilarated, disgusted or mesmerized by the awful possibilities they suggest, but never simply depressed. Depression comes in the presence of depravity that makes no pretense about itself, a kind of depravity that says, 'You and I, we are base, ugly, tasteless, cruel and beastly; let's admit it and have a good wallow.' That is how Times Square speaks. And not only Times Square. Few cities in the country lack the same amenities. Pornography, prostitution, massage parlors, hard-core movies, narcotics dealers - all seem to be inescapable and permanent results of an enlightened view of liberty which has expanded the American's right to choose his own method of shaping a life. Granted such freedom, it was probably inevitable that many of us would yield to the worst instincts, and many do, and not only in New York. Most cities, however, are able to keep the evidence out of the center of town. Under a rock, as it were. In New York, a concatenation of economics, shifting real estate values and subway lines has worked to turn the rock over and put the show on display in the middle of town. What used to be called 'The Crossroads of the World' is now a sprawling testament to the dreariness which liberty can produce when it permits people with no taste whatever to enjoy the same right to depravity as the elegant classes.