#city

...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars. ↗

— Tana French

#independence #noise #reverie #solitude #life

If Miss Malin had now been given the choice of returning to her former reasonable state, and had been capable of realizing the meaning of the offer, she might have declined it on the ground that you have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head. ↗

— Isak Dinesen

#fun #life #life

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#grace #perspicacity #violence #writing #age

As a child, at the age when others promise to be Chateaubriand or nothing, I had written that I would be myself or nothing. I had certainly not foreseen that one day I would find myself in the position of being both myself and nothing. 65 ↗

— Marcel Benabou

#success #age

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims. ↗

— Leon Krier

#city #development #urban-planning #architecture

I am an artist you know ... it is my right to be odd. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#artist #artistic #artists #artsy #creative-people

Don't just be a consumer, be a creator. Somewhere inside you is a masterpiece waiting to be exposed. ↗

— Raimy Diaz

#authenticity #be-yourself #creativity #find-yourself #personal-growth

The Walker towered over him like a half-built skyscraper with a bad attitude. Its bulbous silver head was home to so many weapons that Nick couldn't even count them. He couldn't even name half of them. ↗

— Peter James West

#science-fiction #tales-if-cinnamon-city #attitude

There are some people—people the universe seems to have singled out for special destinies. Special favors and special torments. God knows we're all drawn toward what's beautiful and broken; I have been, but some people cannot be fixed. Or if they can be; its only by love and sacrifice so great that it destroys the giver. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#beauty

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#new-york-city #beauty