2,405 Quotes About Cities

There are cities that have no ... I don't know what to call it, an identity perhaps. A sense of being someplace different. Lots of those in the Empire. Very old cities with lots of history, but one day is much like the next.

...Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Long-time inhabitant of steeples, accustomed to contemplating, from his perch on a rainspout, the expanse of roofs, he knew that the souls of cities are more substantial and more lasting than those of all their inhabitants put together.

You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living.

It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not matter whether you have good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.

Libraries, museums, universities, everything we designed and built over six thousand years. Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.

As the number and the size of cities keep growing across the world, changing conditions bring shifts in language and vocabulary. Despite the social and linguistic complexity, however, there are only two types of cities: those where a woman can walk after dark relatively freely and those where she possibly cannot. — Elif Shafak, Taksim Square, Istanbul: Byzantine, Then and Now,

Airports are not simulations of cities; rather cities are simulations of airports.