City Description Quotes

[Paris] is dirty. It has pigeons and black yards. The people have white skin.

There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

San Francisco! City of dreaming spires, people live here... Golden Gate Bridge, ahh the Romans came here.

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.

Until it seems the whole city will be covered with gold pollen shaken from the bell-towers, lilies plundered with the weight of massive bees . . .

Los Angeles is a large city-like area surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel.

A city with all the personality of a paper cup. (On Los Angeles)

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

The three books I've written in Florida about L.A. are my best takes on the physicality of the city, as far as description goes.

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older.

I know that Brighton is famously a mixture of the seedy and the elegant, but in the summer of 2001 seediness swamped elegance hands down.

I beheld the metropolis of the World, orchard of the Universe, hive of nations…human anthill, portal of Islam, throne of royalty, bursting with palaces and portals within, shining on the horizon with convents and schools, illuminated by the moons and stars of its learned doctors, which appeared on the bank of the Nile.

This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.

Winter in Peking is insurpassable, unless indeed it is surpassed by the other seasons in that blessed city. For Peking is a city clearly marked by the seasons, each perfect in its own way and each different from the others.

Taking it as a whole, Mexico is a grand city, and, as Cortes truly said, its situation is marvellous.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.

Baghdad is altogether built of chrome-yellow kiln-dried bricks.