Bayard Taylor Quotes

Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

Look at London or Paris: they're both filthy. You don't get that in Tokyo. The proud residents look after their city.

I found that through my life, living in the city of Toronto, I look above the Pizza Pizza sign, and I look above the other signs and window dressing, and I see evidence of a city that no longer exists in the keystones and the decorations that line the tops of buildings. That presence of the old city has always moved me.

Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified.

In Los Angeles, by the time you're 35, you're older than most of the buildings.

Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills.

I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.

I would like to invest more of my brain space in understanding the history of my city, because whenever I learn about the history of Detroit, it's always so fascinating, from a little kind of beaver-trading post to the place where automobiles were manufactured.

Western Mosul is the historic heart of one of the oldest cities in the world. Its narrow streets and alleyways are impassable for armored vehicles.

People my age, we would hear from our parents and grandparents who were raised in Detroit about how great this city was from 1900 to the '60s.

Compton is this amazing place with a rich history. I see it as a new Brooklyn.

I obviously spent a lot of time in New York City, and I loved it, but Chicago has a very different history than New York City does.

That's the beauty of Mumbai. While some parts have grown rapidly, there are places like Churchgate that have retained their character.

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

I love going to the river not only to enjoy nature, but to think about the Los Angeles River's place in our city's history and to envision its great place in our future.

Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city - a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

My favourite city is Moscow, because of its history, which I find fascinating. As I learned to speak Russian, it made it even more interesting.

Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places.

Citties are taken by the eares.