Elif Safak Quotes

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

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.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

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

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

Sometimes I miss the spirit of London, but it's a very gray place.

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

Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on, but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Good and bad make up a city.

Citizens are the energy of Seoul.

You know people probably don't realize this but I lived in Denver for 10 years as a kid. I was familiar with the city and what it had to offer. You know like any place it's changed a lot over the years. But that familiarity hit home for me.

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

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

The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags.

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

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

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.

The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.

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

The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.