Nick Harkaway Quotes

The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.

In the country, people are kind. In the city, people are hard an' cold, like the concrete and steel.

Sophistication" is another word for that inventive mix of tolerance, resilience, and resourcefulness city people develop.

People in towns are always preoccupied. 'Have I missed the bus? Have I forgotten the potatoes? Can I get across the road?

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

The city's full of people who you just see around.

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind.

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.

If life is hard on you, dwell in cities

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

Millennials want to live in urban areas.

I'm from the East Coast. I love the city. I love the characters. I love the kind of people we are, the kind other people look at in amazement.

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

I really don't like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It's too tumultuous. It's too crazy.

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.

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

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.

I love the city. I love the energy of New York and what happens here. But I'm very happy I don't live in the city on a daily basis, because I really do spend a great deal of my time, when I'm not on the road, in my studio - everyday, everyday, everyday.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread.

Most people are walking around the city like corpses; they aren't alive enough to notice the trash. They come from other places and they see it as a big garbage dump. Do you want to live and work in a garbage dump? I don't. That's partly because I grew up in the most pristine environment possible - Hawaii, where it is sacrilege to leave your garbage on the ground.

It is more a mentality than the actual places people live, as Jefferson and Hamilton would argue about - city versus country. For example, someone could have an empty place mentality yet be living in a condo in Boca Raton.

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