Ellen Goodman Quotes

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

Three days in a city now and I'm quite flipped. There's too much noise. I just can't do with it.

I live in a flat in central London. I do like it there; there's always stuff going on. But I do crave a bit of peace and quiet.

I probably shouldn't live in New York.

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

I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me: and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum of human cities torture.

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.

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.

I'm affected by my environment. Los Angeles makes me defensive and wary.

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

We should be worrying about if you live in the city you're more likely to have anxiety or mood disorders and to be schizophrenic. More than the problems people have from social media.

I'd left Hawaii twice in my life, so I'd been on an island my whole life. I had no clue. I didn't know how to live in a city.

Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.

There is such a difference between the pursuits of men in great cities that one part of the inhabitants lives to little other purpose than to wonder at the rest. Some have hopes and fears, wishes and aversions, which never enter into the thoughts of others, and inquiry is laboriously exerted to gain that which those who possess it are ready to throw away.

The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn't occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.

Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

I like living in the city, but I like being able to get out of it as and when I like.

A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.

I absolutely love the balance between New York and Miami because I go to New York and I get so inspired and it's really busy and it's like the real city and then I come to Miami and I'm just in a happy place.

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

Note that both of these papers [the New York Post and the New York Daily News] are big sellers in a city whose residents like to go around saying they'd never live anyplace else on account of they'd miss the opera.