Uzodinma Iweala Quotes

It's a kind of madness in cosmopolitan cities now.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

I just love the sheer mess of New York.

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.

I feel like I'm married to what I do, to the streets. And I feel like when the streets are mad, it's serious.

If you're able to grow up in Nigeria and go through certain things, you're able to tackle anything around the world because you're able to live wherever, if you can survive in a city like Lagos or Warri or Niger Delta, as far as I'm concerned.

The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side.

I think that New York City in the year 1900 was a very difficult place to survive.

For me, London seemed to be frantic without going anywhere.

I'd always been interested in Nigeria's past.

I can guarantee you that at least 90% of my people that are my age group in Nigeria - who are considered the youth - had no clue about how Nigeria, the real origins of Nigeria.

People's hustle in the Bronx is real.

City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.

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.

I was with Essien Udom in Nigeria.

You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

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.

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

There are so many cities in every single city.

I think it's fair to say you can't predict a straight line to victory. You know, there'll be good days and bad days along the way.

Affairs go on, and all will take some shape or other, but it keeps one in hot water all the time.

New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.

I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago 's South Side.

Having worked on climate crisis for almost 40 years now, I've seen good days and bad days. And through all of that time, the general trajectory has been it's getting worse, it's getting worse. But in the last ten to 20 years, there's a second development; the solutions are more and more, and more available. So having this broad overview that I've developed over a long period of time, I now see the evidence that the solutions are available. We're gonna do this.

On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.