We love cities. Though we moved out of Manhattan a few years ago for the little town of Bethel, Connecticut, we’ll live the rest of our lives thinking of ourselves as New Yorkers, while still enjoying a place where you can find deer crossing the street at night and the supermarket checkout person knows us by name.
But to go back to where we began: We love cities. We love songs about them (“I Left My Heart in San Francisco), TV shows set in them (Seinfeld) and Broadway musicals where they are part of the story (Chicago, obviously).
Finally, we believe it’s true for many metropolises (and not just New York) that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
With that in mind, and to give our brains a break from a week in which all the news is coming out of Washington D.C., we’ve gathered a dozen lovely quotes from works of fiction about them. Some we knew. Some we found online. And others came from our big fat shelf of quotation books. Here they are (and if you’d like to share favorites of your own, we’d love to hear them):
· “All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.” Christopher Morley, “Where the Blue Begins”
· “When they fall in love with a city it is for forever. As though there were never a time when they didn’t love it.” Toni Morrison, “Jazz”
· “The {World’s] fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.” Eric Larson, “Devil in the White City”
· "A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart ..." Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”
· “Cities are not people, but I think they might be sentient.” N.K. Jemisin, “City We Became”
· “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
· To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?” Ling Ma, “Severance”
· “Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.” Neal Shusterman, “Downsiders”
· “For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.” Simon Van Booy, “Everything Beautiful Began After”
· “The most beautiful city in the world is one where you are happy.” Erich Maria Remarque, “The Night In Lisbon”
· “What is the city but the people.” William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus
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