#cities

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

#fictional-london #imagination #life #literary-london #literature

I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room. ↗

— Sheridan Hay

#city-life #urban-life #life

This was the Karachi now – barbed wires protecting consulates, the pretentious covering themselves with faces of those who were hiding behind those barbed wires. This was Karachi – gaudy and luxurious, with a façade of glamor, ignoring the truth underneath. But Sophie was no cynic, and still loved the city she had returned to. ‘You can’t hate what’s yours,’ she smiled to herself. ↗

— Umair Naeem

#karachi #love

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance—romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. ↗

— André Aciman

#life

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#delillo #literature #terror #nature

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. ↗

— Scarlett Thomas

#nature

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#distrust #towns #nature

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality. ↗

— Jane Austen

#cities #great #look #morality #our

There is such a desire to give everybody a piece, we're probably wasting a great deal of homeland security money trying to be politically correct, when we really need to make sure that our cities get the money they need. ↗

— Shelley Berkley

#correct #deal #desire #everybody #get

All cities do face similar, significant trends in the future... most importantly global warming and climate change. ↗

— Cate Blanchett

#cities #climate #climate change #face #future