73 Quotes About City-life

A place that is extremely urban, wholly metropolitan, with a lot of huge buildings built in symmetrical grids smudged with the filthy smog, lights stubbornly flickering through the windows even after midnight.

It (urban peacekeeping) was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historical rivalries imported from the wide-open spaces of the countryside into close quarters.

I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.

Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.

I hear nothing but the hustle and bustle of the city. Cars with flashing lights zip past me. People talk, some loud, some quiet. I whisper to myself. “This is what it’s like to go unnoticed.” I take in a deep breath and inhale the freezing air. It smells like ice here. Ice and cigarettes.

I unlocked the door of my apartment, where the only movement, while I was gone, had been the light moving across the walls from the morning to evening and a scuttling roach or two, and the air inside smelled of loneliness. The ache got eased a little the next day, after I'd picked up my dog from my sister, gotten sucked back into the slipstream of the city. But only a little. And soon it spread, until the word home could make me cry. I wanted one.

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating.