Big City Quotes

“That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams.

The girls of 1929.”
― Anna Godbersen, Bright Young Things

“Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“A little tranquil lake is more significant to my life than any big city in the world”
― Munia Khan

“Your presence here is is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t.”
― Jay McInerney

“Everything becomes symbol and irony when you have been betrayed.”
― Jay McInerney

“Taste is a matter of taste.”
― Jay McInerney

“Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art.”
― Jay McInerney

“In a big city you become a ghost; you walk on the crowded streets and realise that you are a kind of transparent entity; an indistinct being, a thing which is not something!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“London had been different. Everyone had been constantly moving, their eyes focused elsewhere, pretending no one around them existed.”
― Tara Sim, Chainbreaker

“She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view--the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can’t imagine what it’s like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.”
― Jay McInerney

“Twin Peaks – my first visit, charming place, as you’ve always told me, but to be honest, Chief, I’m a big-city girl and always will be.”
― Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

“Manhattan across the water, the glittering towers. I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I came back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going through on glass a lightbulb at a time.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“They say the lost ones seek the cities because there they can be alone but not lonely and I dare to say that the streets of London shaped my muscles, the way my eyes work and wander. The city taught me how to see the moon and not just the top of the finger pointing to it, which I always did before. The city taught me that a home is not where you rest your head; it's nothing permanent, and neither is it a city or a country or a friend. The city taught me how to leave and to be left and it taught me that it is possible for flowers to grow from the concrete because I’ve seen people flower and bloom during the worst of storms, because it’s simply necessary. It’s about survival. The necessary breaths to go on.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“There are great roads, beautiful bridges, lovely parks, gorgeous gardens and wonderful buildings in a big city. But there is something missing, something very important: The spirit of nature!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“All major cities in the world look best at night because night skilfully hides their ugly side!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“While you are running from one place to another in the big city, you feel that your life is running away from you, because in a sense, life is time!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Big cities love most the hours when most people sleep, because only then can they listen to the peaceful sounds of the nearby forests and breathe in the clean scent of the winds blowing from there!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“La vida a la ciutat se'm complicava: hi havia lloguers per pagar, amors per trobar, gent amb qui rebolcar-se, sabors per tastar, contactes per fer, contractes per aconseguir i després buscar-te amics que et salvessin de tota aquesta intempèrie. La ciutat era una massa fumejant de mel, dolça i densa, calentona, però si et despistaves podia engolir-te sense miraments.”
― Irene Pujadas, Els desperfectes

“Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
― Willa Cather , O Pioneers!