Mary Elizabeth Braddon Quotes

The first time I landed in New York and got a cab to my hotel, I was completely struck by it: a feeling of life and chaos, 24 hours around the clock, just like in London. And whatever your problem is, it's insignificant. You're just a small part of something very big.

New York seems very very foreign to me, like more foreign than almost anywhere in America, and almost anywhere in the world, I find it like one of the most overwhelming places.

Living in L.A., I was completely lost - and I enjoyed it.

When I was in New York it was like a maze, a rat maze, going from one little box to another little box and passing through passageways to get from one safe haven to another.

I now know my right from my left and my up from my down. Unluckily, my terrible sense of direction remains. For me, to live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never ever make a smooth entrance, always to get caught looking lost on the street.

Different cities have different vibes to them, and New York is such a huge, thriving metropolis.

The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape

I found myself within a forest dark.

I do not know who I am tonight.

In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own. But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant--one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.

Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?' 'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.' 'The city still has working phone booths?' 'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?

I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre, Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.

To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.

Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.

I hate nature. I really do. Nature is composed entirely of sticks, dirt, fall-down places, biting and stinging things, and savageries too numerous to list. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Man has been building cities since the year oughty-ought, just to get away from this stuff.

I know not whether you came to me or I to you. Not whether it was a dream, asleep or awake. I am lost in the darkness of a downcast heart. Dream or reality. Let it be decided tonight.

The one thing I do remember is that as I retraced my steps through all the familiar streets of my life, Inow felt completely lost.

Getting lost in human perception is a very scary idea.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.