John Burnside Quotes

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

Cities are immortal.

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, "the metropolis of the empire"?

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

The form a city assumes as it evolves over time owes more to large-scale works of civil engineering - what we now call infrastructure - than almost any other factor save topography.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.

We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.

What made Manhattan Manhattan was the underground infrastructure, that engineering marvel.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

New York has always been a city of change and a city about change, and it is a back-leading development. Nobody's going to want to come to New York if it looks like another strip mall.

Most cities have a centre surrounded by suburbs, but London has numerous centres: it's the model of a twenty-first century metropolis.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.