John Milton Quotes

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

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 modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

I love cities.

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

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

Cities are immortal.

I really like Pietermaritzburg: it is really a course for me - really technical.

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

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

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.

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

I live in New York City, so there's so much stimulation when you walk outside, it does not require a television in the home.