City Chaos Quotes

I like going down to London for a couple of days, but it's a place where I'd never fancy living - too busy, too lively, people on top of you.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

London is a modern Babylon.

It would be a nice place if you took all the people out of the city.

By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.

I still love Delhi but get scared of the madness sometime. I know that my fans love me. But it gets a bit tough to handle when, in their excitement, they start touching and poking you to see if you're for real.

San Antonio drives me crazy, but Chicago drives me crazy in a different way.

London, ... like a bowl of viscid human fluid, boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily into the home counties.

Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired, you've had a headache since you arrived, but you can't leave because then you'd miss the party.

Cars are all jammed up all along the road and a light turns red and someone honks. In every one of those cars there is a story or a hundred stories. For every light on in al of those huge city buildings there is a story. No one knows what I am about to face and no one knows my story and neither do I right then.

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

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

We lived in Manhattan, which was unbearable sometimes because it was so noisy. There were sirens blaring, construction sites going, people shouting and swearing at each other.

New York, in itself, has this frenzied, chaotic feeling to it. It's such a big city, and it's always moving, and there are so many people.

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

Often when I walked alone in the mountains, I tried to make sense out of the two halves of my life. What went on in the city during the week seemed chaotic and unrelated to the events in my mountain world.

I am not a country girl at all. I tried the whole country dream and it didn't work for me. I need the madness and pandemonium of a city around me.

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.