Michel De Certeau Quotes

In New York, especially, so much of your life is spent on the streets. You don't always want to be driving around in an SUV with a security guard. You want to be able to walk to a restaurant; you want to go and do things.

In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You're on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.

Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.

I'm a country boy who hasn't really been exposed to city living, and it throws me.

Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars and drinking soda popon stoops, and have passed a judgment, the gist of which is: "This is deplorable! If these people had decent homes and a more private or bosky outdoor place, they wouldn't be on the street!" That judgment represents a profound misunderstanding of cities. It makes no more sense than to drop in at a testimonial banquet in a hotel and conclude that if these people had wives who could cook, they would give their parties at home.

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

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

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.

City's just a jungle; more games to play Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away I was raised in the country, I been workin' in the town I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

People had said to me New York is kind of cutthroat and people walk past you on the street. I find it the opposite. I find that people want to talk.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

I love just going out and sitting down in the park along with the thousands of other people who apparently have no work to do during the day. People come up to me, but they are generally really nice. New York makes it easier, for me at least. People manage to be enthusiastic and sort of sane at the same time. And that’s lovely.

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.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

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.

But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

Old New York City is a friendly old town From Washington Heights to Harlem on down There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down It's hard times in the city Livin' down in New York town

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.