37 Quotes About Suburbs

Thinking back, I can almost feel the air in the commons that day, the things eddying around us. We were breathing in violence and desperation and other people’s hallucinations, but it was all invisible to us then. Like the fluoride in the water or the radiation from Brookhaven, the DDT and the valium and the Strontium 90. All the heavy atoms and alkaloid molecules that shape us and then break us apart.

I pray for the kids in the suburbs… I pray that one day, we’ll all graduate from similarity.

I drove through the suburbs, where all the houses looked identical, one variation of another of the same thing. I said to myself, I’d rather fire myself from a cannon, pick up the shit of elephants and eat it, suffocate inside Houdini’s water tank, lie beneath the running horses, or sodomise a big cat in a cage and pay the consequences than get trapped in these suburbs of cardboard, gossip, and conformity.

Do you remember the suburbs and the plaintive flock of landscapes The cypress trees projected their shadows under the moon That night when as summer waned I listened To a languorous bird forever wrothAnd the eternal noise of a river wide and dark(The Voyager)

One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.

It occurred to me that the quiet in the suburbs had nothing to do with peace.

...bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs.

I have a theory about suburbs,” Grace mused. “...it all happens here, all the great crimes, kept hidden until they’re too loud to contain. Quiet perversions, quite substance abuse, quiet violence, quiet art. We just don’t hear about it until something big happens. You mark my words – in one of those houses down there is a man with a needle in his arm, fucking a dog whilst composing the greatest poetry since Homer.

Have you ever lived in the suburbs? It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life.