Amos Bronson Alcott Quotes

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

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

It's pleasanter to work in the country, where you can wander out among the trees. But I don't get as much work done. In the city you don't want to leave the room because there's all that chaos going on.

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.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

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.

In New York City, a lot of people think "the great outdoors" is the area between your front door and a taxi cab.

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

This isn't a fairy tale. It's New York City.

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.

Through that windshield I saw a city that didn’t know it was hungry and a reflection of a guy who was FREE.

I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

In New York, you are constantly faced with this very urgent decision that you have to make, about every twenty minutes...you have to decide, immediately, you have to go "Ohmigod. Do I look at the most beautiful woman in the world or the craziest guy in the world?"

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.

The city atmosphere certainly has improved her. Some way she doesn't seem like the same woman.

When you live in a city with no stars to wish on, you have to wish on each other.

Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.

Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?