Suburban Identity Quotes

I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.

To grow up five miles outside of the greatest city in the world is a bizarre experience.

How can I be a folk? I'm from the suburbs you know.

It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.

The Long Island experience is so strange. You're a satellite around the city, so the presence of the city is always looming.

I'm really the candidate who has really lived his whole life in suburbia.

The only thing urban about me is the parties. I have almost always been a suburbanite. I got a car for my graduation. I want to have a manicured lawn and have my son go to a good college.

I grew up in the suburbs and basically associate the suburbs with cultural death.

I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn't get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn't interested in having to follow.

We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York.

People born in Queens, raised to say that each morning they get on the subway and "go to the city," have a resentment of Manhattan, of the swiftness of its life and success of the people who live there.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.