When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billi...
The city (of Vienna) had an unerring tradition of celebrating some of it's greatest composers after it had around them to die in poverty.
I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week. "Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself. "Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.
I think I was his lifeline too. We were both adrift in New Your City. We were both surrounded by so many people, but ultimately we were terribly alone. Until we found each other.
Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be repre...
The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)
It wasn’t only his city that was healing, Raphael thought, his eyes catching the refracted light that betrayed Aodhan’s presence in the sky; his people were, too. And it had all begun with a single, vulnerable mortal who did not accept that to be...
Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not q...
Jacksonville is the friendliest city in the world. Test it out for yourself and see. Walk in to any public Men’s room and step up to a stranger at a urinal and introduce yourself and offer to shake his hand. You’ll soon know what it means to meet...
You know," he said, his voice making me feel cold in spite of the heat, "this city can get ahold of you and pull you back no matter how hard you try to climb out. Like a grave.
Sergeant Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Guard was on duty. He was guarding the Brass Bridge, the main link between Ankh and Morpork. From theft. When it came to crime prevention, Sergeant Colon found it safest to think big.
A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.
Know something? I'd lay even odds that between the people following us and the people hunting us, we've become this city's principle means of employment. Tal Verrar's entire economy is now based on .
Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.
Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.
Mandy loved the smell of a sunny day after a night of rain. The sun hit the orange puddles, the overgrown, soft, green grass on her lawn, and it beamed down through the orange steel mill smog, sending otherworldly, bizarre shadows across the concrete...
Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
The buckets emptied quickly, and men from different squads took turns bringing water from the gully that lay towards the city, where, in the feeble shade of emaciated mulberries, a muddy stream lived out its last days in the diabolical heat.
The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.
I know that I too could try a story out, rebuild mine, make it live again several minutes before the full of the day, the sun, the city. But I haven't the strength, stupidly. I rise and carry on. One more time.
