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#1

“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

tags: burning, censorship, fire

261 likes

#2

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

tags: feathers, hope, inspirational, souls

8832 likes

#3

“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.”
― Roman Payne, Cities & Countries

tags: cities, cities-and-countries, city, enmity, glory, love, novel-quote, personalities, rejection, roman-payne, travel, traveler, travelling, urban, voyage

439 likes

#4

“...a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

tags: blood-red, chicago, cities, neon, steel, urban, wilderness

30 likes

#5

“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

tags: cities, city-planning, urban, urban-planning

19 likes

#6

“Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

tags: 156, city, situationist, urban, urbanism

5 likes

#7

“In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

tags: city, danger, disintegration, nightmares, unease, urban

1 likes

#8

“We live in a society populated by strangers. Each day, we feel more distant from each other, more alone, all while being surrounding by millions. Each day we watch as our city turns into a desert, one in which we are all lost -- looking for that oasis we like to call... "love." The more we wait, the more everything--and everyone--looks like a grain of sand escaping between our fingers before vanishing into the wind. How do we find something--or someone-- we can no longer see, but which is right there before us? And how do we hold on to what is most precious in life?”
― Fábio Moon, Daytripper

tags: city, connection, life, society, strangers, urban

8 likes

#9

“I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face.”
― Helen Garner, Monkey Grip

tags: city, depersonalization, detachment, downtown, melbourne, urban

3 likes

#10

“The city continued on its way. Boys tried to sell me drumsticks, girls played hopscotch, the Bihari badly worker carried his gathri of ironed clothes to the homes from which they had come, and the buses honked at suicidal cyclists. At one level this was vaguely confusing. Surely, something should acknowledge how much things had changed? At another level, it was oddly comforting.”
― Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom

tags: bombay, city, crowd, india, mumbai, urban, urban-fantasy

2 likes

#11

“Urbanity provides us with so many ways to avoid people. Isn't that what distinguishes it from traditional rural life, where the onus, perhaps because it was difficult & rare, was more on greeting people?”
― Tabish Khair, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position by Tabish Khair

tags: modern-life, solitude, urban

1 likes

#12

“This sudden sweet loot appearing, I felt like we were tricking the world—living in urban loopholes.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

tags: foraging, loopholes, scavenger, scavenging, society, survival, trickery, urban

1 likes

#13

“The epistemological separation of colony from metropolis, the systemic occultation of the colonial labour on which imperial prosperity is based, results in a situation in which... the truth of metropolitan existence is not visible in the metropolis itself”
― Fredric Jameson

tags: capitalism, colonialism, geography, ideology-imperialism, marxism, metropolist, post-modernism, urban, urban-warfare

1 likes

#14

“I imagine many urban dwellers love this feeling, that moment when you step out of your building and whatever has preoccupied you goes flapping away like a burst of pigeons rising all at once, wing and wind carrying them out into this pulsing, indifferent life.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

tags: city, city-dwellers, city-living, manhattan, new-york-city, urban, urban-living, urbanites

1 likes

#15

“Moses threw the spent cigarette butt to the ground. It bounced once then lay still. A lazy wisp of smoke drifted towards the reaching shadows. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed flakes of grit from the seat of his jeans. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he moved away from the pipe and began to negotiate a route down the alley. A rivulet of cans, wrappers and remnants of kebabs dotted the ground like flotsam; the waste of nights past, discarded by the nameless, faceless masses marking their territories with futile gestures. Oh, sure, the trash was still emptied these days – there were still garbage men around, but it just delayed the inevitable, prolonging the agony of a tired and dying world.”
― Scott Kaelen, Moses Garrett

tags: dystopic, sci-fi, urban, visionary

1 likes

#16

“A cat came out of an alley, took a look at all the snow, and went back in. Farther on up the street a fat man, aproned and puffing, emerged from a restaurant and whiffed the cold air and gazed yearningly at the sky. As though even the dreams were up there, much too far away.”
― David Goodis, Of Tender Sin

tags: noir, streets, urban

5 likes

#17

“Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.”
― David Goodis, Of Tender Sin

tags: city, noir, urban, winter

13 likes

#18

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

tags: detective, noir

327 likes

#19

“He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

tags: hard-boiled, noir

77 likes

#20

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

tags: detective, noir

74 likes

#21

“I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

tags: chandler, crime, marlowe, noir

61 likes

#22

“There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

tags: arriving, cities, city, destination, empty, home, leave, leaving, left, lose, love, new, streets, touring, travel, traveller, travelling, vagabond, wanderer, wanderlust

523 likes

#23

“6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,
and I still don’t know which month it was then
or what day it is now.
Blurred out lines
from hangovers
to coffee
Another vagabond
lost to love.

4am alone and on my way.
These are my finest moments.
I scrub my skin
to rid me from
you
and I still don’t know why I cried.
It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn’t recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest.
But then you must have changed your mind
or made a wrong
because why did you
leave?

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,
and I still don’t know which month it was then
or what day it is now.
I replace cafés with crowded bars and empty roads with broken bottles
and this town is healing me slowly but still not slow or fast enough because there’s no right way to do this.
There is no right way to do this.

There is no right way to do this.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

tags: alone, berlin, break-up, breakup, broken-hearted, city, coffee, growing-up, hang-over

424 likes

#24

“Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

tags: alone, being, charlotte-eriksson, city, crowd, floor, inspiration, lonely, mastery, meditation

289 likes

#25

“This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.”
― Roman Payne, Cities & Countries

tags: affections, bad, cities, cities-and-countries, city, good, payne, roman, soul, travel, voyage

177 likes

#26

“There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

tags: change, city, night, reality, stars

171 likes

#27

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”
― Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

tags: chicago, city, october, spring

99 likes

#28

“when I become death. Death is the seed from which I grow.”
― William S. Burroughs

tags: burroughs, city, dead, death, radio, william

73 likes

#29

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand”
― Italo Calvino

tags: city, memory

59 likes

#30

“On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

tags: city, night, plague

48 likes

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