2,405 Quotes About Cities

I tis hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams. Expressways and their ramps are examples. Moreover, even in the case of large parks, campuses or waterfronts, the barrier effects can likely be overcome well only along portions of perimeters.

San Francisco, by contrast, is all about the collision between man and the universe. It is on auto-derive. Anarchic, blown-out, naked, it shuffles its own crazy deck. To walk the streets is to be constantly hurled into different worlds without event trying. As William Saroyan wrote, "The city has the temperament of a genius. It's unpredictable. Any street is liable to leap upwards at any time . . . It is a city with no rules. Like nature itself it improvises as it goes along.

Cities are architecture plus space and time.

Cities dream of other cities.

New ideas need old buildings.

cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like . . . like black holes, maybe.

If geographically uneven economic development is a deep feature of economies on all scales, as economic geographers tell us, then the existence of leading and lagging economies will be a long-term feature of the landscape. And competition will merely exacerbate the shift of productive enterprise to leading places, generate unproductive races to the bottom, or induce lagging cities to give up altogether.

Korea vets in flannel shirts down from Michigan, accompanied by ruddy grandsons in Under Armour camo jackets, coexist peacefully with Montessori moms navigating strollers between clumps of grandparents eyeing big baskets of apples and small ones of plums. Trucker hats are worn without irony here; the hipsters are welcome but not in charge.

But it is too late. The tether is cut and we are here. We become! We stand, whole and hale and independent, and our legs don’t even wobble. We got this. Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here.