Urban Life Quotes

“You can't understand a city without using its public transportation system.”
― Erol Ozan

“See you later, tailgater.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“The half-mourning siren of the ambulance, like the funeral wail of the conch, upbraids the dozing guards at every door.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Non ho atteso una risposta ai miei quesiti e sono rimasta seduta dov’ero, pronta ad alzarmi e ballare da sola sul brano seguente, che mi auguravo non essere un lento. In effetti, questo è forse il più grande difetto che si potrebbe imputarmi. Mi è sempre piaciuto pensarmi legata a un passato che non ho mai conosciuto, imprigionata in un tempo che non mi appartiene, ma sono solo un’esponente della mia generazione, e la mia generazione va di fretta. I lenti, a quanto pare, non li conosce più.”
― Sara Zelda Mazzini, I Dissidenti

“Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.”
― William Kennedy, Roscoe

“Street culture is a culture of containment. Most young people do not realize that it all too often leads to a “dead end”. “Street culture,” as I am using the term, is a counterforce to movement culture. Street culture in contemporary urban reality is synonymous with survival at all costs. This world view is mostly negative, because it demands constant adjustment to circumstances that are often far beyond young people’s control or understanding, such as economics, education, housing, employment, nutrition, law, and so forth.”
― Haki R. Madhubuti

“From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“You can never please humans. No matter what the weather—shine or rain—some will always complain! Humans are so hard to please that even if you grant them an eternal easy life in Paradise, some will still want to go back to Earth, even if living on Earth means struggling, starving, bleeding, and suffering!”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“A city is simply a passel of people packed in a pot like pickles.”
― David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War – A Tense Drama of Political Passions, Military Restraint, and America's First Shot

“My life had indeed become meaningless to me. Even lack of sleep was not a concern for me; only hunger remained a sensation worthy of articulation. Once that hunger was assuaged, I would return to my inert state.”
― Ashokamitran, The Ghosts of Meenambakkam

“The Sydney of this time was a different place to the honeymoon city I'd visited with Damien. That one was the crescent of the bridge, the rolling waves beneath the ferry, the shaded streets in The Rocks where we'd bought touristy postcards to send home. Everywhere was so lush, everything blue and green. This Sydney was more or less the space between Campsie and Dulwich Hill. Suburban streets, 7-Eleven hot chocolate, stream, car fumes, perc in my nose and throat, light dancing across the scratched Perspex of train window.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst.

But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. Their television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. From behind the ghetto walls they see glistening towers of glass and steel springing up almost overnight. They hear jet liners speeding over their heads at six hundred miles an hour. They hear of satellites streaking through outer space and revealing details of the moon.

Then they begin to think of their own conditions. They know that they are always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do. They look at these impressive buildings under construction and realize that almost certainly they cannot get those well-paying construction jobs, because building trade unions reserve them for whites only. They know that people who built the bridges, the mansions and docks of the South could build modern buildings if they were only given a chance for apprenticeship training. They realize that it is hard, raw discrimination that shuts them out. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“What was stolen by the city, nature restores.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Deep underground, microbes turn half a century's worth of city waste into methane. The gases and leachate are extracted through an extensive network of subterranean pipes and then used to power 22,000 nearby homes. While 150 million tons of garbage gradually decomposes unseen below the surface, above ground, the former dump reverts to meadows, woodland and saltwater marshes, providing a haven for wildlife and a massive park for the people of New York.
This is Fresh Kills in the 2020s. In 2001, the infamous landfill received its last, and saddest, consignments - the charred debris of the World Trade Center. Since then, it has been transformed into a 2,315-acre public park. Three times bigger than Central Park, it is the largest new green public space created within New York City for over a century, a mixture of wildlife habitats, bike trails, sports fields, art exhibits and playgrounds. This is poisoned land: fifty years' worth of landfill has killed for ever one of the city's most productive wetland ecosystems. Restoration is impossible. Instead, a brand new ecosystem is emerging on top of the toxic garbage”
― Ben Wilson, Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City

“এসো করো স্নান নবধারাজলে— বলবে কে আর?
শহরে বৃষ্টি জলকাদামাখা নোংরা দেদার,
গীতবিতানের শুকনো পাতায় বর্ষার গান
রবীন্দ্রনাথ একলা ভেজেন, আমাকে ভেজান।

নীপবন নেই, শহরে রয়েছে কড়া নলবন
সিরিয়ালে দেখা হিরো-হিরোইন সাজানো দুজন,
পেডাল নৌকো শহুরে লেকের প্রমোদতরী
এসো হে আষাঢ়, ছাতায় তোমায় বরণ করি!”
― Kabir Suman

“The city slid by — shop windows glowing, neon reflected on the glass, people in coats and holding umbrellas. Everything moved on, alive in its own rhythm — without her.
Chapter 39”
― Irina Semikop, Voluntary pain

“My family has a farm, so from time to time my folks send me loads of vegetables. But as a creature of a consumer society, I prefer store bought bread and chocolates.”
― Inio Asano, Solanin

“I have no idea what to do with myself. And while I wait for my epiphany, I feel the toxins collecting in my body. But I'm still young and dissatisfied. Constantly disgruntled by society and adults. I'm just your average worker in Tokyo.”
― Inio Asano, Solanin

“Truth is, for every galaxy that far surpasses every planet, there is a Hood. In every Hood, there is birthed a remnant of greatness and uniqueness like no other. Against all odds, that remnant shall be a mighty force that changes the game”!”
― Mya A Chavis, A Sovereign Pursuit: Stolen Justice Redeemed Limited Edition with Illustration's

“Country people are much more friendly that town people. I suppose they don't have to spread their friendly feelings out over so many persons, so it's thicker, like a pound of butter on one loaf than on a dozen. Friendliness in the country is not scrape, like it is in London.”
― E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods

“She starts thinking how the city’s peaceful aura withers and gives birth to its decrepit personality.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“In the diverse gallery of urban surprises, spotting a crocodile inside a swimming pool is just another masterpiece on the canvas of quirky city life.”
― Dipti Dhakul

“Smelled like home. Stink permeates homelessness: the smell of trash, the smell of dirty streets, of fire bins and piss and other people's body odor, the wet dog smell that saturates your clothes and bedding, the smell of rust and dirt and decay.”
― Duncan Ralston, Where the Monsters Live

“Cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a fear in the fabric of reality.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“We’ve built a ‘human zoo,’ caging ourselves in routines, technology, and artificial environments.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity: A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Electricity, invisible and precise, requires ugly and twisted wires that cut through the skies.”
― Paulo Ricardo Zargolin

“Monsters aren’t born. They’re made—one secret, one betrayal, one silence at a time.”
― Alonzo J. Crippen, The Monster Beside the Silence

“It's a beautiful thing watching your flawless body, dripping from sweat as you try to compose yourself while being licked, rubbed and kissed.

You moan as if you were trying to summon the strength to get one last rep in.”
― Stephen Q Gray, One Voice Of A People

“The dimly lit room only has light from an annoying alarm clock, which reminds us that it will soon be time for work.

I hit the rest button again as the thought creeps into our heads that perhaps a sick day might be in order.”
― Stephen Q. Gray