Downtown City Quotes

#1. There is always a sneer in Las Vegas. The mountains around it sneer. The desert sneers. And arrogant in the middle of its wide valley, dominating those diligent sprawling suburbs, the downtown city sneers like anything. #Quote by Jan Morris

#2. The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell #Quote by Jack Kerouac

#3. In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation. #Quote by Teju Cole

#4. My father told us stories about our ancestors and about the city and how we should act. He told us that the four sins are wine, women, wealth, and wrath. #Quote by Ida Pruitt

#5. - Come Inanna, enter, Neti said to her, and as Inanna entered the first gate, the sugurra, crown of the steppe, was taken from her head.
- What is this? asked Inanna
- Quiet, Inanna, she was told. The customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned. #Quote by Hal Duncan

#6. Yeah, yeah," Wayne said. "That too. But if I could get everybody drunk, think how much happier this city would be." "So long as you get me drunk first, I'd be fine with it." She held out her cup to him. "Top a lady off, will you? #Quote by Brandon Sanderson

#7. When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War. #Quote by Robert Jay Lifton

#8. Whenever we leave the ground
And take to the sky
I'll smile as I'm gazing down
Cause I've always wonder why we won't need feathers to fly. #Quote by Owl City

#9. I have always thought that if the city cannot come to the country, than the country must come to the city. #Quote by Jens Jensen

#10. In February of 1972, a snowstorm blew into Kansas City, and I decided to hitchhike to California. The roads were icy, snowflakes howling, and nobody would drive me to the highway, so I humped through the snow and ice and caught a ride with a concerned cop to the Kansas Turnpike. #Quote by Daniel Woodrell

#11. They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out. #Quote by Salman Rushdie

#12. A city is a strange place for dawn. The sun just can't seem to make any headway in the cold streets #Quote by Steve Toltz

#13. I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on. #Quote by Patrick White

#14. Libraries are the pride of the city. #Quote by Amy Tan

#15. Do you remember when we stood together on Blackfriars Bridge?" he asked softly, and his eyes were like that night had been, all black and silver.
"Of course I remember."
"It was the moment I first knew I loved you," Jem said. "I will make you a promise. Every year, Tessa, on one day, I will meet you on that bridge. I will come from the Silent City and I will meet you, and we will be together, if only for an hour. But you must tell no one. #Quote by Cassandra Clare

#16. LIFE IN ALEXANDRA was exhilarating and precarious. Its atmosphere was alive, its spirit adventurous, its people resourceful. Although the township did boast some handsome buildings, it could fairly be described as a slum, living testimony to the neglect of the authorities. The roads were unpaved and dirty, and filled with hungry, undernourished children scampering around half-naked. The air was thick with the smoke from coal fires in tin braziers and stoves. A single water tap served several houses. Pools of stinking, stagnant water full of maggots collected by the side of the road. Alexandra was known as "Dark City" for its complete absence of electricity. Walking home at night was perilous, for there were no lights, the silence pierced by yells, laughter, and occasional gunfire. So different from the darkness of the Transkei, which seemed to envelop one in a welcome embrace. #Quote by Nelson Mandela

#17. Man is the same today that he has always been. He is a rebel against God. He may, in some generations, hide his rebellion a little more carefully than at other times, but there is no change in his heart. The men who builded the city against God back in the days of Babylon had the same hatred as that which possessed the men who nailed the Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. #Quote by Donald Barnhouse

#18. There's a ruthlessness to the city now that wasn't there before. I was in Dublin a few months ago, when we were shooting Breakfast on Pluto, and if I saw one kid throwing up on the street, I must have seen a hundred of them. #Quote by Liam Neeson

#19. Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour. #Quote by Evelyn Waugh

#20. Loneliness, on the other hand, has no age bracket. I used to think that exciting countries could keep you happy and warm on novelty alone. Now I know: you can move to Paris, delight in the city, drink your cafe au lait, but no matter how pretty the buildings and balconies are, eventually you're going to find yourself hugging the lamp posts for company like you're in Les Miserables. #Quote by Jessica Pan

#21. I was just sick, beaten, in a city of millions, of suffering by myself. I was twenty-seven going on sixty-five. I should have received Social Security for my misery. #Quote by Tiffanie DeBartolo

#22. It's time for the truth: I want to be traded, I'm ready to be traded. First and foremost, this has nothing to do with the fans or the city, it's just time for me to look after me. #Quote by Vince Carter

#23. It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks. #Quote by James Jones

#24. Goldfish in a glass bowl are harmless to the human mind, maybe even helpful to minds casting about for something, anything, to think about. But goldfish let loose, propagating themselves, worst of all surviving in what has to be a sessile eddy of the East River, somehow threaten us all. We do not like to think that life is possible under some conditions, especially the conditions of a Manhattan pond. There are four abandoned ties, any number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes and a single sneaker, and a visible layer, all over the surface, of that grayish-green film that settles on all New York surfaces. The mud at the banks of the pond is not proper country mud but reconstituted Manhattan landfill, ancient garbage, fossilized coffee grounds and grapefruit rind, the defecation of a city. For goldfish to be swimming in such water, streaking back and forth mysteriously in small schools, feeding, obviously feeding, looking as healthy and well-off as goldfish in the costliest kind of window-box aquarium, means something is wrong with our standards. It is, in some deep sense beyond words, insulting. #Quote by Lewis Thomas

#25. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. #Quote by Hunter S. Thompson

#26. Hillary Clinton flew with President Bush to New York City on Tuesday. She was amazed at the changes aboard Air Force One. For eight years she believed that flight attendants couldn't wear clothes because it made the plane too heavy. #Quote by Argus Hamilton

#27. Took over my city and I never asked permission to. #Quote by Drake

#28. That is the way to lay the city flat, To bring the roof to the foundation, And bury all, which yet distinctly ranges, In heaps and piles of ruin. #Quote by William Shakespeare

#29. Aurelia was still on the stoop. The moon was higher and the ivy shadows were deeper. I sat at her side and we watched a little cloud tilt at the drifting moon and go asunder quite pale and discomfited. And then, wonder of wonders and delight of delights! Our hands somehow touched, and our fingers closed together and did not part. After half an hour Aurelia said, with that smile of hers: "Do you know, you haven't spoken a word since you came back!" "That," said I, nodding wisely, "is the Voice of the City. #Quote by O. Henry

#30. ... where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic. #Quote by China Mieville

#31. Mr. Couture is not an American citizen. He is from Montreal. It is a large city, about the size of Boston, in that very large country just north of here. You may have heard of it. They play hockey. - #Quote by Sylvain Neuvel

#32. We keep drifting from one city to another, inhaling the inimitable fragrances of the myriad places. #Quote by Avijeet Das

#33. We did get out and walk around on the Strip. Jep, Miss Kay, and I posed for a picture with one of those big, painted picture with face cutouts--Jep was Elvis in the middle, and Miss Kay and I were the showgirls in bikinis with tropical fruit hats.
We also splurged and went to see Phantom of the Opera. It was my first time going to a Broadway-style musical, and I loved it. I could relate to struggling to find true love. We did a little bit of gambling and card playing, and I remember visiting a Wild West town, right outside the city.
Mostly, though, Jep and I were kind of boring our first year of marriage. All we wanted to do was stay home and spend time together. #Quote by Jessica Robertson

#34. Not much time will be gained, O Athenians, in return for the evil name which you will get from the detractors of the city, who will say that you killed Socrates, a wise man; for they will call me wise even although I am not wise when they want to reproach you. If you had waited a little while, your desire would have been fulfilled in the course of nature. For I am far advanced in years, as you may perceive, and not far from death. I am speaking now only to those of you who have condemned me to death. And I have another thing to say to them: You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words - I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words - certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuer #Quote by Plato

#35. When he came back from downtown, he had forgotten to bring his license, his identification, the $2 for the wedding license. So we got married two days later. #Quote by Eydie Gorme

#36. Seemed like the only way into the city these days was by being dragged through the gates as a prisoner with a hand around your neck. Lucky me. #Quote by Alwyn Hamilton

#37. We shall defend every village, every town and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved. #Quote by Winston Churchill

#38. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn't even sit down, and not just because there is no room. #Quote by Patricia Marx