Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

The Bronx always seemed very dreary to me.

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than Washington. It is shit.

If you are walking through the hood and you notice the cracks in the sidewalk where all the weeds, pebbles, dirt and grit settle in, that's me.

In New York, you have thousands of buildings that have never been renovated, that have horrible designs, that are really cramped and terrible.

In Detroit there are a lot of houses they are going to demolish because no one is taking care of them.

Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.

The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Thousands pass it, while others trample it under foot, and thus the chances are that it will perish before it is seen by the one discriminating spirit who will prize it above all else. The fact that no one has as yet arisen to make the most of it does not prove that nothing is there.

New York City isn't Chuck E. Cheese. We don't have ball pits for the kids to play in. We have titty bars and crack.

Currently, it was leading him through a neighborhood that was on the downside of whatever curve you hoped you'd bought your property on the upside of. Graffiti and garbage were everywhere here. They were everywhere in the city, if it came to that, but elsewhere the garbage was better quality, and the graffiti was close to being correctly spelled. The whole area was waiting for something to happen, like a really bad fire.

On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.

What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.

New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.

The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

The iron bolt...mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in a gloomy prison.

Beware of letting small faults pass unnoticed under the idea it is a little one. There are no little things in training children; all are important. Little weeds need plucking up as much as any. Leave them alone and they will soon be great.

Where soil is, men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers.