335 Quotes About Place

the ragged western fringe of Los Angeles called Venice. . . . Here the city stops its white cement sprawl, its hunger to engulf the whole earth under tons of trucked-in concrete. Here in the lap of the blind blue-eyed Pacific, Los Angeles is stopped dead by the sheer liquid cliffs of the sea. Here the trail ends. After Death Valley and Donner Pass, there is only this precarious oasis.

To the locals, he realized, the Orkneys were the center of the world.

I had a stack of books of fabulous contemporary writers who'd left their roots and who seemed invigorated thereby. Isabel Allende from Chile to California, Clarice Lispector from Russian to Brazil, Haruki Murakami from Japan to Italy, Kazuo Ishiguro from Japan to England. I knew I wasn't going back to New England, that I'd found my real homeland. North California was where my characters wanted to be.

By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant of or unwilling to carry the load.

Casinos were nothing new for Edmonton. Outside of Nevada, the city had more gambling space per capita than any other city in North America, a fact that some people in the chamber of commerce liked to celebrate, while others didn’t.

I mean the kind of roots that happen privately between you and a certain place. Like you come to a place, and instead of planting a flag and saying mine, the place plants something in you. The place claims you, it knows your name and the crooked corners of your heart, and you've pledged yourself to it before you've even realized what's happening.

Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left, just separate houses with separate televisions and separate televisions and less and less dropping by.

Mi piace questa città al mattino presto, mi piace la sensazione di assoluto anonimato, che ti garantisce New York, di essere un numero tra tanti e di poter ricominciare da capo, mi da speranza.

Until disability reform takes place that looks after all disabled people, you will never see me participate in the Pledge of Allegiance.