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- Towered cities please us then,
- And the busy hum of men.
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, The Living City
Every city is a living body.
ST. AUGUSTINE, City of God
The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, Jul. 28, 1791
How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
What is the city but the people?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Coriolanus
- We flee away from cities, but we bring
- The best of cities, these learned classifiers,
- Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "The Adirondacs," May-Day and Other Pieces
In the Big City large and sudden things happen. You round a corner and thrust the rib of your umbrella into the eye of your old friend from Kootenai Falls. You stroll out to pluck a Sweet William in the park -- and lo! bandits attack you -- you are ambulanced to the hospital -- you marry your nurse; are divorced -- get squeezed while short on U. P. S. and D. O. W. N. S. -- stand in the bread line -- marry an heiress, take out your laundry and pay your club dues -- seemingly all in the wink of an eye.... The City is a sprightly youngster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get licked off.
O. HENRY, "The Complete Life of John Hopkins"
In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out. All the agencies of inquisition—the hounds of the trail, the sleuths of the city's labyrinths, the closet detectives of theory and induction—will be invoked to the search. Most often the man's face will be seen no more. Sometimes he will reappear in Sheboygan or in the wilds of Terre Haute, calling himself one of the synonyms of "Smith," and without memory of events up to a certain time, including his grocer's bill. Sometimes it will be found, after dragging the rivers, and polling the restaurants to see if he may be waiting for a well-done sirloin, that he has moved next door.
- A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
- If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the
- whole world.
WALT WHITMAN, "Song of the Broad-Axe"
Now in the city there are two worlds. One world has walls around it and one world has people around it. The second world is outside, with the late-winter sky and the bare trees and the hard pavements that stretch in every direction, and with the bright shining shop windows and the chattering crowds. This world has a sightless malicious face, which is the face of the crowd. The face of the crowd is not immediately to be seen, it only becomes apparent after a while, when it shows itself in wondering side-long looks and sharp glances.
MAEVE BRENNAN, The Visitor
Cities are the abyss of the human species.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, Émile
I've had my fill of these city guttersnipes--all that scavenging scum! They're the sort of people, who, if the gates of heaven opened to them, all they'd feel would be a draught.
HAROLD PINTER, The Dwarfs
You could live in a city, be one of its inhabitants, without comprehending or being part of its wider picture. Like mice living in a human house--it was their address, but that didn't mean they had rights, that they had to be viewed with anything more than benign amusement, that they weren't fair game for cats or traps.
MICHAEL MARSHALL, The Upright Man
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