“Think only of the essentials: the physics of the gyroscope, the flux of photons, the architecture of very large structures.”
-J.G. Ballard
“What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.”
-Joseph Brodsky
“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.”
-Italo Calvino
“The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, is their instantaneous magnetism.”
-Jean Baudrillard
“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.”
-Walter Benjamin
“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.”
-_Rupert Brooke_
“New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.”
-Johnny Carson
“All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it—an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.”
-Peter Conrad
“If you’re not in New York, you’re camping out.”
-Thomas E. Dewey
“All great art is born of the metropolis.”
-Ezra Pound
“There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.”
-Kathleen Norris
“To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.”
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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