Aldous Huxley Quotes

... a metropolis rarely of one mind

In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity.

The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as - carried too far - one of its weaknesses.

To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.

I miss the city Bret and I live in, Wellington. It's a good place to be creative, in the same way New York is.

City diversity represents accident and chaos.

all large cities are alike at night.

[On living in New York City:] I'm oblivious to everything. I just don't notice anything. I sat in a coffee shop, drank half a cup of coffee before I noticed there was lipstick on the cup. There was wadded-up gum and lipstick on the napkin. I must have been sitting on that woman's lap for an hour.

Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country.

Growing up in Jersey City was interesting. I got to learn a lot about different cultures: I had Hindu friends, Middle Eastern friends, black friends, Spanish friends.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?

A great city is a great solitude.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

New York City was the world's biggest vibrator. Everything vibrated above, and below the streets.

New York is a city of conversations overheard, of people at the next restaurant table (micrometers away) checking your watch, of people reading the stories in your newspaper on the subway train.

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.

I was 17 when I moved to NYC . I'm now 32. But I do know I can't see myself living anywhere else. I love the food, the fashion, art, the intelligence of this city and the people that live in it.

The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.