Norman Douglas Quotes

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

I live in L.A., I grew up here, it's not that crazy for me because it's L.A., you know?

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.

The urbanized life has lead to the destruction of the legends.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.

I am a city girl.

Since I was an adult, I've always lived in the centre of London - King's Cross, Bloomsbury - and never thought I'd leave.

I have a somewhat reclusive quality myself, and actually what's great about New York is that it pushes you to be social because the streets are full of people.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

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.

I am a New Yorker. I like New York. And I like cities. And it's not my desire to make New York more suburban. I would personally just like to vet each person.

There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

The populations of most cities around the world continue to grow. The reasonspeople congregate in cities are various and complex, and the dawn of the digital age has not put much of adamper on the human urge to congregate.

Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution. And yet with more than 80 percent of Americans living in metropolitan areas, there are still demagogues who want to run down the idea of multiculturalism, of urbanity, being the only future we have. We either live or die based on how we live in cities, and our society is either going to be great or not based on how we perform as creatures of the city.

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

Cities are natural, that's why they're everywhere. It's not like there's only one city, and everybody's like 'What the f**k is this?' No, cities are all over the place. They're natural. You know what's not natural? You, in the middle of the mountains, in the middle of the winter.