Urban Decay Quotes

“I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost.”
― Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems

“I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Urban decay is a thing. And the way to avoid urban decay is to actively plan for urban regeneration.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.

It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.

The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.

("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes")”
― Cornell Woolrich

“O que afinal eu continuava procurando nesta cidade poluída, maligna e amaldiçoada? O real.”
― Caio Fernando Abreu, Onde Andará Dulce Veiga?: Um Romance B

“The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.”
― Richard Price, Clockers

“They had this block to themselves. The windows of all the tenements on both sides were marked with the white X of urban renewal; they stood nearly empty, waiting for the wreckers. Within them the cockroaches crawled and the rats chittered, but the humans were away, infesting some other neighborhood.”
― Richard Stark, The Seventh

“The little car was soon free of the city, for the smear of suburbia that had once lain along the western highways for miles was gone. During the Plague Years of the eighties, when in some areas not one person in twenty remained alive, the suburbs were not a good place to be. Miles from the supermart, no gas for the car, and all the split-level ranch homes around you full of the dead. No help, no food. Packs of huge status-symbol dogs—Afghans, Alsatians, Great Danes—running wild across the lawns ragged with burdock and plantain. Picture window cracked. Who’ll come and mend the broken glass? People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. Fireweed, from which bees make the finest honey of all, grew acre after acre over the sites of Kensington Homes West, Sylvan Oak Manor Estates, and Valley Vista Park.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The Wasteland was an empty car park behind a long abandoned pub. Minah like it because she said it reminded her of the permanence of concrete in stark contrast to the entropy of humanity. Harrison had dubbed it the Wasteland after the TS Eliot poem, because it was full of disillusionment and despair.”
― Lili Wilkinson, The Boundless Sublime

“The windows and doors will be boarded up and the plants allowed to creep over the building. Moss will grow over the platform and, for a while, youths will come and spray paint and smash what they can - I like to think that this is their way of mourning its loss.”
― Kate O'Donnell, Untidy Towns

“Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“To say it's the poor quality of the paint under socialism is correct, but it is not enough. To say it's soft-coal exploitation and air pollution, bad gasoline and bad cars, or lack of money - that again would be correct. But not the whole story. All these reasons (and probably many more) are not enough to explain the decrepitude. I think the reason is in us. The cities have been killed by our decades of indifference, by our conviction that somebody else - the government, the party, those 'above' - is in charge of it. Not us. How can it be us, if we are not in charge of our own lives?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

“Addiction isn't a moral failure; it’s a societal one. In the ER, I’ve sutured wounds from overdoses and watched schools fail to arm kids against the coming storm. ‘The Lotus Mark: The Pink Lotus’ isn’t fiction. It’s a glitter-coated bullet aimed at apathy. Here’s the truth: Lotus pills don’t just dissolve in your bloodstream. They dissolve families, cities, futures. I wrote this because nurses don’t just heal bodies; we armor souls. And sometimes, that armor is stormtrooper-plated and dripping in defiance.

Deanna LaForce RN], ER nurse and author of ‘The Lotus Mark: The Pink Lotus’ (Star Wars cosplay tutorials sold separately).”
― Deanna LaForce, The Lotus Mark: The Pink Lotus. A Novella on Addiction and Trafficking Through the Eyes of an ER Nurse