Cities In The World Quotes

1. "A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil--of people passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices--of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray's rhythmic death--of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work--of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller's court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell--of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold the devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread!"
Author: A. Merritt

2. "The Secret to saneful living is in the Key between these two worlds. In order to serve the higher ideal, one must revert to serving the Spark within all the multiplicities herein conceivable in the apparent world. The spark in itself is not contained for it encompasses both realities, that of the inner, and the apparent"
Author: AainaA Ridtz

3. "We live in secret citiesAnd we travel unmapped roads.We speak words between us that we recognizeBut which cannot be looked up.They are our words.They come from very far inside our mouths.You and I, we are the secret citizens of the cityInside us, and inside usThere go all the cars we have drivenAnd seen, there are all the peopleWe know and have known, thereAre all the places that areBut which used to be as well. This is whereThey went. They did not disappear.We each take a piece Through the eye and through the ear.It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speakIn the outside worldWe have to hope that some of that soundDoes not come out, that an armNot reach outIn place of the tongue."
Author: Alberto Alvaro Ríos

4. "Under a bad leadership Serbs are capable of committing the most terrible atrocities; under good leaders we can do great deeds. It's like a field - if it's not cared for, the weeds will take over. But if you tend it, water and feed the seeds, you will read a bountiful harvest. Serbs are lazy, we lack discipline and have no capacity for self-criticism." With Their Backs to the World"
Author: Åsne Seierstad

5. "One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world."
Author: Austin Grossman

6. "I thought of Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to the societal. I no longer even hated Rivington Street but the idea of Rivington Street, all Rivington Streets of all nationalities allowed to pile up in cities like gigantic dung heaps smelling up the world, ambitions growing out of filth and crawling away like worms. I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag, and I realized that I had singled him out not because he had been born into the world anymore selfish, ruthless and cruel than anybody else, even though he had become all three, but because in the midst of a war that was selfish, ruthless and cruel Sammy was proving himself the fittest and the fiercest and the fastest."
Author: Budd Schulberg

7. "They are surely gods who speak to himWith steady voicesA glance from him drives men to theirkneesHis sigh brings cities to ruinI wonder if he dreams of surrenderOn a bed of white flowersOr is that the mistaken hopeOf every would-be conqueror?The world was not made for beauty likehis."
Author: C.S. Pacat

8. "I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day."- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers"
Author: Carl Sandburg

9. "Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It's chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can't quite make sense of, though we know it's there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me."
Author: China Miéville

10. "I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I'm going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it."
Author: Cornel West

11. "For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free."
Author: David Mitchell

12. "I am a little church(no great cathedral)far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,i am not sorry when sun and rain make aprilmy life is the life of the reaper and the sower;my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving(finding and losing and laughing and crying)childrenwhose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladnessaround me surges a miracle of unceasingbirth and glory and death and resurrection:over my sleeping self float flaming symbolsof hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountainsi am a little church(far from the franticworld with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;i am not sorry when silence becomes singingwinter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire tomerciful Him Whose only now is forever:standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)"
Author: E.E. Cummings

13. "The all-pervading disease of the modern world is the total imbalance between city and countryside, an imbalance in terms of wealth, power, culture, attraction and hope. The former has become over-extended and the latter has atrophied. The city has become the universal magnet, while rural life has lost its savour. Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers, while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place in the countryside. The prevailing lack of balance, based on the age-old exploitation of countryman and raw material producer, today threatens all countries throughout the world, the rich even more than the poor. To restore a proper balance between city and rural life is perhaps the greatest task in front of modern man."
Author: E.F. Schumacher

14. "Why was it necessary for the flood to come? Why did the Lord permit the cities of the plains to be destroyed by fire? It was because the people would not take advantage of their opportunities. They were not only wasting their lives here upon the earth but were also bringing into the world another generation which would follow their bad example. . . . The cities of the plains were burned that their wickedness might not continue to jeopardize other communities and children as yet unborn."
Author: George Albert Smith

15. "A city may be dirty on the outside but is clean on the inside. Many cities in the world are clean on the outside but dirty on the inside."
Author: Gregory David Roberts

16. "He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces."
Author: Hermann Hesse

17. "I think the world has mostly ended because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you're arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which road you took."
Author: Isaac Marion

18. "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them."
Author: Italo Calvino

19. "If the beginning of wisdom is in realizing that one knows nothing, then the beginning of understanding is in realizing that all things exist in accord with a single truth: Large things are made of smaller things. Drops of ink are shaped into letters, letters form words, words form sentences, and sentences combine to express thought. So it is with the growth of plants that spring from seeds, as well as with walls built from many stones. So it is with mankind, as the customs and traditions of our progenitors blend together to form the foundation for our own cities, history, and way of life. Be they dead stone, living flesh, or rolling sea; be they idle times or events of world-shattering proportion, market days or desperate battles, to this law, all things hold: Large things are made from small things. Significance is cumulative--but not always obvious. --Gaius Secondus"
Author: Jim Butcher

20. "The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpation, but by the individuals. The strongest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person's decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.But history can be quite the slattern. One never knows who that person is, where he might be, or what decision he might male.It is almost enough to make me believe in destiny."
Author: Jim Butcher

21. "It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word. There is danger in this, and the danger is that the enormous expressive and self-referential capacities of the written word, that is, the capacities to keep referring to referring to referring, will reach a point where you lose contact with the real world. And this, believe me, is very common in universities. There's a technical name for it, I don't know if we can use it on television, it's called "bullshit." But this is very common in academic life, where people just get a form of self-referentiality of the language, where the language is talking about the language, which is talking about the language, and in the end, it's hot air. That's another name for the same phenomenon."
Author: John Rogers Searle

22. "The Nevernever is dying, human. It grows smaller and smaller every decade. Too much progress, too much technology. Mortals are losing their faith in anything but science. Even the children of man are consumed by progress. They sneer at the old stories and are drawn to the newest gadgets, computers, or video games. They no longer believe in monsters of magic. As cities grown and technology takes over the world, belief and imagination fade away, and so do we.""What can we do to stop it?" I whispered."Nothing." Grimalkin raised a hind leg and scratched an ear. "Maybe the Nevenever will hold out till the end of the world. Maybe it will disappear in a few centuries. Everything dies eventually, human."
Author: Julie Kagawa

23. "Not the most beautiful, or artistic, or intellectual of cities in Italy, Ascoli Piceno is certainly one of the most easy going and affable, good to look at without being awesome. It is energetic and worldly, and it eats well."
Author: Kate Simon

24. "Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax."
Author: Lauren Willig

25. "We're so caught up in trying to do everything, experience all the essential things, not miss out on anything important...We can't read all the good books, watch all the good films, go to all the best cities in the world, try all the best restaurants, meet all the great people...Life is better when we don't try to do everything. Learn to enjoy the slice of life you experience, and life turns out to be wonderful."
Author: Leo Babauta

26. "Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent."
Author: Louise Lawrence

27. "In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them."
Author: Lynne Truss

28. "Barcelona is one of the best cities in the world. I love it there. I love Big Sur. It's stunning and you get a therapeutic experience there. The drive up the coast is one of the most beautiful I've ever done. Also, Hong Kong. I could easily live there!"
Author: Meghan Markle

29. "Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then—our cities and towns cast too much light into the night—but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. Tristan would stare into the darkness of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed and sleep like a dead man."
Author: Neil Gaiman

30. "Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree"
Author: Neil Gaiman

31. "…Magic is often a tricky thing. Often it is explainable. People fly through the air in planes and live underwater in submarines. Plants grow within weeks and cities operate and sustain millions of people. A person can talk to practically anyone almost anywhere around the world instantly. People's images are transported by photo in the time it takes to press a button. Dinosaurs seem real, huge apes exist, and other worlds are a movie ticket away."
Author: Obert Skye

32. "But ideal cities are very much the product of their own ages. Designed as complete urban statements, they bear the unmistakable imprint of their own culture and world view in every street and building. And yet to be successful a city has to be open to continuous development, free to evolve and grow with the demands of new times. Like science fiction accounts of the future, ideal cities quickly become outmoded."
Author: P.D. Smith

33. "But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.' Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book."
Author: Ray Bradbury

34. "The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
Author: Ray Bradbury

35. "Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable."
Author: Rebecca Solnit

36. "Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars."
Author: Robert E. Howard

37. "San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world."
Author: Rosalynn Carter

38. "Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did."
Author: S.E. Hinton

39. "?And when this intoxication has worn away... when every desire is fulfilled and every language learned- when there are no more distant cities to explore; no classics to be studied; not another coin to be stuffed in to one's coffers- what then? One can have all the comforts of the world, but what use are they if there is no comfort in them?"
Author: Seth Grahame Smith

40. "Our art is made in cities like New York by people who are running from other places. They feel themselves as misfits who were trapped in dead-end suburbs. They hated high school. Their parents did not understand. They are seeking a better world. And when they realize that the world is wholly a problem, that the whole problem is in them, they make television for other people who are also running, who take voyage in search of a perfect world, then rage at the price of the ticket."
Author: Ta Nehisi Coates

41. "Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

42. "Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever."
Author: Toyo Ito

43. "The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.[...]It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense or our own value, our own position, and our own rights. [...] They are the fortress of our traditions, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy."
Author: Walter Lippmann

44. "Your daughter is ugly.She knows loss intimately,carries whole cities in her belly.As a child, relatives wouldn't hold her.She was splintered wood and sea water.They said she reminded them of the war.On her fifteenth birthday you taught herhow to tie her hair like rope and smoke it over burning frankincense.You made her gargle rosewaterand while she coughed, saidmacaanto girls like you shouldn't smellof lonely or empty.You are her mother.Why did you not warn her,hold her like a rotting boatand tell her that men will not love herif she is covered in continents,if her teeth are small colonies,if her stomach is an islandif her thighs are borders?What man wants to lay down and watch the world burn in his bedroom? Your daughter's face is a small riot,her hands are a civil war,a refugee camp behind each ear,a body littered with ugly thingsbut God, doesn't she wearthe world well."
Author: Warsan Shire

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