June Jordan Quotes

I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.

I just wanna get to the end of the day without it raining.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

I don't read the papers or watch TV.

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.

Life isn't that complicated on paper. It's made more complex by the day and age we live.

Coming out of college, back to New York, where I didn't really know that many people, I thought our world was very atomized.

In New York, if you spend a few hours doing nothing, you feel like the whole world passed you by.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

My love of dynamic complications often led me to avoid simplicity when perhaps it was the wisest choice.

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

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.

It's simple until you make it complicated.

I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.

A mighty maze! But not without a plan.

To be a modern person in 2012, you are often required to have some electronics in your life. And I do. I try to put that phone down, put the computer away, and get out there and hike in the woods; feel it in my feet, feel it in my hands; get out in the garden and feel the soil under my fingers, my fingertips and my fingernails. I try to be involved in nature in a very tactile way. I think that's important.

and now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance, But all dash to and fro in motor cars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive.

The urban man is an uprooted tree, he can put out leaves, flowers and grow fruit but what a nostalgia his leaf, flower, and fruit will always have for mother earth!

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

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?"

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

I wave to the double-decker buses from my bike, but the passengers never wave back. Why? Am I not an attraction?

On a daily basis, my home life is very simple. I spend about 2 hours every morning reading the newspaper. As my two assistants will tell you, I don't come to work in the mornings, for two reasons. First, I want to be informed - that means I go through The New York Times every day, and then I watch some news on television. The second is, mornings are the best time to communicate with my clients abroad.