cityscape allure Quotes

In Rome you long for the country. In the country you praise to the skies the distant town.

At night... the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze.

I walked down Paseo del Prado, losing myself to the sights, sounds, and dense magic of the city. There's something weirdly calming about being alone in a big city. It made me feel like the universe was hugely generous, and that my species was so damn smart to have constructed such a beautiful city.

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow.

People almost always imagine that life is going to be better in town and that the streets of the town are paved with gold.

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.