Kenneth Grahame Quotes

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

[Urbanization] is the inevitable outcome of the processes of growth and the processes of modernization.

It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

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

Omaha, like Rome, is built on seven hills.

The San Gabriel Mountains rise like a rampart at the edge of the city, safeguarding more than 500,000 acres of mature forests, mountain streams, dramatic waterfalls, and towering peaks that reach over 9,000 feet. These untamed places attract bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and other threatened or endangered species.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

I grew up in a forest. It's like a room. It's protected. Like a cathedral... it is a place between heaven and earth.

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.

I grew up in the Bronx.

I grew up on the edge of a national park in Canada - timberwolves, creeks, snow drifts.

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.

The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

Cities are immortal.

Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture, which ranges from the bland to the fancifully bland.

When you go into a forest, anything can happen.

Anywhere which is in a forest, that's my zen place.

Modern man has a very abstract idea of what a wood is. I guess that if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what a wood actually was, they would see it as a place where big trees grow.

Hong Kong never had prestige. It's gone from fishing village to where it is today.