Metropolis Quotes

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.”
― Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The Authoritative and Definitive Edition

“London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“London is on the whole the most possible form of life.”
― Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The Authoritative and Definitive Edition

“Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.

And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds.”
― P.D. James, Unnatural Causes

“Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there. Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller. Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started there for a reason and then couldn't imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it. Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you came up with not much.”
― Choire Sicha, Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City

“Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.”
― Khushwant Singh, Truth, Love & A Little Malice

“But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

“Mit zunehmender Industrialisierung hört die Maschine auf, bloßes Werkzeug zu sein, beginnt ein Eigenleben, zwingt dem Menschen ihren Rhythmus auf. Er bewegt sich, sie bedienend, mechanisch, wird zum Teil der Maschine.”
― Heide Schönemann, Fritz Lang: Filmbilder Vorbilder

“With an evermore increase of industrialisation machine stops being merely a tool, develops a life of its own and imposes its rhythm onto human. Operating it he moves mechanically, becomes part of the machine.”
― Heide Schönemann, Fritz Lang: Filmbilder Vorbilder

“Welcome to the place on the other side of midnight.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Pritajeno zlo

“Through a trick lighting technique
the skyline was made and faded
with the care of a pointillist—
maybe aiding us to think nothing was
missing. We traded verbs

about what was happening
in the metropolis, realizing,
in the scorched plum of dusk,
actual human infinity was occurring
on an island before us....”
― Kristen Henderson, Of My Maiden Smoking

“The Stormcrow City is just a big meat grinder; People get in on one end, and comes out on another. We're just turning the handle.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Pritajeno zlo

“ভ্রমর বিহীন কিছু ফুল
ভ্রমর বিহীন কিছু ফুল এখানেই ঝরেছিল রক্তের ভেতর
আম্র রাজহাঁস স্বর্ণডিম্বপ্রসু রাজহাঁস এখানেই
কাটা হয়েছিল- সুস্বাদু মাংসের গন্ধে পরিতৃপ্ত উনুন
দেখেছিল আকাশের অন্তহীন উনুনের তাপে শীতের কার্ডিগান
খুলে এক বালিকা দুই বুকে তার রেখেছে উত্তাপ
তার পিকনিক পার্ডেনের কাছেই কাটা হয়েছিল রাজহাঁস আমার
রক্তের ফুলগুলি ভ্রমর বিহীন ঝরে পড়েছিল সেদিন
রাজহাঁস ও ফুল বিষয়ক কবিতাগুলি আমি
মাংস রাঁধার জন্যই দিয়েছিলুম উনুনে
সাধ ছিল সে বালিকা পাবে বটে মাংসের সুঘ্রাণ
কারণ অনেক মাংস ঘেটেছি আমি
আমি দেখেছি মাংসের বায়ু পিত্ত কফ দেখেছি
এমনকি সত্ত্ব তম রজ এই তিনপ্রকার গুনও থাকে মাংসাশী শরীরে
তবু আমি এক জরায়ু থেকে বেরিয়ে আরেক জঠরে
খুঁজেছিলাম আমার সন্তানের মুখ-
আমার মৃত পিতার শরীর দেখে আমি বুঝেছিলুম
বেঁচে থাকা জরুরী আমার মা-র হতাশা দেখে
বুঝেছিলাম মৃত্যুও দরকারী হতে পারে জীবনের
তবু সকল জ্ঞানের পর কাঁটা ও কম্পাস বিহীন- আমি
আমি এক বালিকার জন্যে কেটে ফেলি আমার রাজহাঁস
কবিতার খাতা ঠেলে দিয়েছিলুম উনুনে এক বালিকার
জন্যে আমার চৈতন্যের ক্রন্দন আমি দেখে ফেলি
বীর্যরসে- তৎক্ষনাৎ আর দেরী নয় বলে
আমি জড়িয়ে ধরি অশোক-ষষ্ঠীর দিন সেই বালিকার শরীর
রক্তের ভেতর ভ্রমর বিহীন ফুলগুলি ফুটে ওঠে”
― ফালগুনী রায় ( Falguni Roy ), নষ্ট আত্মার টেলিভিসন

“এই একাকীত্বই মহান এটা যদি তুমি তোমার হাতে থাকা ঘড়ির কাঁটার গতিবিধির সাথে ধীরে ধীরে দ্যাখো।
ভালোবাসার কারণে আজ
মানুষ খুবই ক্লান্ত
বিকলাঙ্গ
মানুষ একে অপরের নিকট শুভ নয়
তাঁরা একে অপরের প্রতি
ধনীরা ধনীর সন্নিকটে শুভ নয়
এক ফকিন্নি অপর ফকিন্নি প্রতিও।
আমরা ভয়ে আছি।
আমাদের শিক্ষাব্যবস্থা আমাদের বলে; নিশ্চই আমরা সবাই একদা বড় মাপের বিজয়ী গাধা হতে পারব।
এটা আমাদের কখনো জ্ঞাত করেনি কোন বস্তিজীবন বা কোন আত্মহত্যা সম্বন্ধে।
অথবা একটা নির্জনস্থানে একাকী পরে থাকা কোন সন্ত্রাসী
অস্পৃষ্ট
অদৃষ্ট
কোন উদ্ভিদ ভরা জলার সম্বন্ধে।”
― Charles Bukowski, Bukowski on Bukowski

“Meanwhile, the reanimated zombies followed along at a much slower pace lurking in the shadows and finishing off anyone that managed to slip by, until the entire city had finally fallen and become a metropolis of the undead.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“The night of 'the look' on the avenue de New York. People drift along not seeing each other. It is like a vernissage without paintings. It could be the Exterminating Angel or 'Pure Festival' - pure in the sense of Virilio's 'pure war' - on screen. The only hot spot is the trap-door through which the champagne arrives. Peculiar feverish, power-mad tribe, dissolute yet oversensitive, metaphysics with infrared lighting. Nothing in their gaze, everything in the way they look, nothing in their eyes, everything in the decibel level.

The gentle air of the Piazza Navona in December, with the acetylene lamps and the reflections of the turquoise water on the Bernini horses. A beauty that is purely Roman. In the Campo dei Fiori someone has laid fresh flowers at the foot of the statue of Giordano Bruno, burned for heresy on this very spot four centuries ago. The touching loyalty of the Roman people; where else would you see such a thing? The hot December multitudes spill out into the street: Christmas is almost as mild here as in Brazil. The city is only beautiful when the crowd invades it. So many people on the streets always gives the impression of a silent uprising. Everyone walks along in the luminous muted buzz of voices and the narrow streets. Everything is transformed into a silent opera, a theatrical geometry. Everything sings in this part of the city.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“It almost felt as if Istanbul had become a blissful metropolis, romantically picturesque, just like Paris, thought Zeliha; not that she had ever been to Paris.”
― Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul

“Big buildings were always the main targets of his megapolisomancy—he claimed they were the chief concentration-points for city-stuff that poisoned great metropolises or weighed them down intolerably. Ten years earlier, according to one story, he had joined other Parisians in opposing the erection of the Eiffel Tower. A professor of mathematics had calculated that the structure would collapse when it reached the height of seven hundred feet, but Thibaut had simply claimed that all that naked steel looking down upon the city from the sky would drive Paris mad.”
― Fritz Leiber, Dark Ladies: Conjure Wife/Our Lady of Darkness

“English: "Laws designed for the big city destroy the rural areas."

Česky: „Zákony navržené pro velkoměsto likvidují venkov.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“Dystopolis by Stewart Stafford

Phantasmagoria in the mirror,
A bribed witness is my whore,
Plastic surgery getting dearer,
I must go work out my core.

Swallowing carcinogen smog,
Painful panting, freezing air,
Neutered day of the old dog,
On my hamster wheel there.

Crawled down to the plague pits,
Crab-like, they crept up on me,
Sour milk séance of the obits,
Drowning in a mausoleum sea.

Mild convulsions on a night cold,
Cram triage bodies in my bed,
Fights reheated getting so old,
Awake to find myself dead.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford