City Quotes

[hauntedheadnc]

What with the festival of grimness that is the news nowadays, it's high time for something lighthearted.

What quotes have you found that you love about your city? Book, movie, play, poem, or news article... What has someone said in a work of art or journalism about your city that you just happen to like? Did they say something that you thought snared the soul of your city just right? Was it something that describes your city or her people perfectly? Or was it something just plain weird that made you smile?

For instance in today's edition of the local paper, an article started out thusly:

Surgery is underway on the terrace just south of Biltmore House. A woman named Flora, who's about 120 years old but looks much younger, is having her right arm reattached.

Of course, the article is about a statue being repaired at Biltmore, but have you ever read a better start to an article?

No, you have not. However, I would like to read what you've found about your city that you really appreciated.

[muertecaza]

Great idea for a thread.

Sometimes I feel like Edward Abbey when I think about Phoenix:

The Developers.... They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human...Time and the winds will sooner or later bury the Seven Cities of Cibola—Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, all of them—under dunes of glowing sand...

Other times, I feel like George Wharton James:

When the ancient myth-maker conjured out of the depths of his vivid imagination the story of the phoenix, classic bird of the ancients prior even to his time, that it had the power inherently within itself to rise from its own funeral pyre, he little dreamed he was preparing a name for the Capital City of the last great State of the American United States. Unlike Tucson and Prescott, she was not born in the early days of strife, race-conflict, and the thrill of newly-discovered great mines. She is a sister of the later day. The first comers who roamed over the valley of the Rio Salado of the Spaniards, soon found scattered here and there the remains of a prehistoric people. Great irrigation canal systems led from village to village, and clearly indicated that a prehistoric race long before had seen and utilized the agricultural advantages of this highly favored region. So, when the settlers came together and decided to start a city, one of them, an Englishman familiar with his classics, suggested that as the new city of the new civilization was to rise on the ruins, the ashes, of a former civilization, he deemed Phoenix an excellent name. The suggestion was unanimously adopted, and Phoenix it became, and doubtless, ever will remain.

[LouisVanDerWright]

Think of London, a small city

It's dark, dark in the daytime
The people sleep, sleep in the daytime
If they want to, if they want to

I'm checking them out
I'm checking them out
I got it figured out
I got it figured out

There's good points and bad points
Find a city
Find myself a city to live in.

There are a lot of rich people in Birmingham
A lot of ghosts in a lot of houses
Look over there!...A dry ice factory
A good place to get some thinking done

Down El Paso way things get pretty spread out
People got no idea where in the world they are
They go up north and come back south
Still got no idea where in the world they are.
Did I forget to mention, to mention Memphis
Home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks
Do I smell? I smell home cooking
It's only the river, it's only the river.

David Byrne

[Centropolis]

since i live a few blocks from where tennessee williams went to high school...

“I found St. Louisans cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial. … I hate the place..."

Tennessee Williams - buried in St. Louis.

is this what you meant?

[Will O' Wisp]

Some of my favorite quotes about San Diego come from Alonzo Horton, founder of the city in the modern era, simply because of the sheer amount of affection he held for SD. If a man could marry a city, Horton would have made San Diego his bride in a heartbeat.

"I could not sleep at night for thinking about San Diego, and at 2 in the morning, I got up and looked on a map to see where San Diego was, and then went back to bed satisfied. In the morning, I said to my wife, I am going to sell my goods and go to San Diego and build a city."

"I thought San Diego must be a heaven on earth. It seemed to me the best spot for building a city I ever saw."

"San Diego is the most beautiful place in the world to me and I would rather have the affection and friendly greeting of the People of San Diego, than all the rulers in the world."

- Horton in a final interview before his death at age 95

I have to say, it's a bit heartening to know that the man who founded your city loved it as much as this.

[hauntedheadnc]

But to a native mountaineer Asheville is not only a city, it is the city. Deep in the wilderness people may never have heard of London or Paris, and but vaguely of New York, but Asheville is a reality. It is the true centre of civilization. Happening one day to speak to a man, living near Roan Mountain, of the World's Fair that been recently held in some, to him, unknown city, he showed a great deal of interest but thought the location of the fair a mistake. "Why didn't they have it where everybody could go?" he complained. "Why didn't they have it in Asheville?"

-- from a copy of The Carolina Mountains by Margaret Warner Morley, 1913, held by the New York Public Library

[UrbanNebraska]

A favorite of mine from early Omaha. Published in the paper in 1868

Some towns are famed for beauty,

And others for deeds of blood,

But say what you may of Omaha,

It beats them all for mud.

Carl Sandburg in 1920 on Omaha's time as a stockyard city

Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies, Eats and swears from a dirty face. Omaha works to get the world a breakfast.

Oscar Wilde after a visit to Omaha in 1882

You have not the lower orders of the eastern cities. I find less prejudice and more simple and sane people. The western part of America is really the part of the country that interests us in England because it seems to us that it has a civilization that you are making for yourselves - not the complimentary echo of British thought.

[SignalHillHiker]

My favourite is "an island in the sky" - suits everything, the foggy weather, the isolation, the cultural self-sufficiency, the beauty.

I like this quote from a U.S. serviceman during WWII that I read recently:



A couple other favourites...

"St. John's, Newfoundland, the most entertaining town in North America, suggesting to me sometimes a primitive San Francisco, sometimes Bergen in Norway, occasionally China, and often Ireland of long ago." - Jan Morris, Welsh travel writer.

Lead paragraph in an Irish Times article - damn, they get us. "The residents of Newfoundland don’t like being called ‘Newfies’ or Canadians, but you can call them Irish. Newfoundland is not Canada, as the people there never tire of telling you. “Canada”, in this context, is not just a euphemism for “boring”, “law-abiding” or “flat”, the island only voted to join the confederation of provinces in 1948, and that vote was split 51 to 49 per cent – a cause of some abiding bitterness among the baymen, the former fishermen who live along these rocky shores."

[dc_denizen]

I'd rather be a lamppost in New York than mayor of chicago
-fiorello Laguardia

[edale]

^ LOL, I've never heard that one. Reminds me of one of my favorite "Arrested Development" quotes:
I'd rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona

[Steely Dan]

"Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way."

- Officer Jimmy Malone

[JManc]

Houston, we have a problem...

[LMich]

Goodness, there are so many, and former Mayor of Detroit Coleman A. Young has so many of the top spots...

On running Detroit in 1987:

"It's been in crisis constantly. And sure it wears me out. But when you get into a fight with a damned bear, you don't get tired until the bear gets tired. If you do, it's your ass. You can't afford to quit, can you?"

To a reporter for the Revolutionary Worker newspaper after she accused Young of working for the "corporate elite."

"You can just revolution your ass on out of here."

There's literally a whole book of his quotes, and most of them speak to what Detroit has been forever as much as some in the area would hate to admit it. lol

[AMWChicago]

Originally Posted by edale

^ LOL, I've never heard that one. Reminds me of one of my favorite "Arrested Development" quotes:
I'd rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona

haha nice reference

[goat314]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

since i live a few blocks from where tennessee williams went to high school...

“I found St. Louisans cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial. … I hate the place..."

Tennessee Williams - buried in St. Louis.

is this what you meant?

I love St. Louis, but it seems to be a very accurate description.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by goat314

I love St. Louis, but it seems to be a very accurate description.

it reminds me of a prosaic book i read about german social interaction with the various hard facades and sort of "trust circles." those on the inside were there for life, and those on the outside have an uphill battle - kind of the antithesis to the "new west" kind of american hyper-friendliness that can (at the extreme) dissolve into severe flakiness and lack of long term friendship over time - but also too far the other way. you kind of have swirled into that teutonic wall a southern warmness i've found with people of (obviously) southern roots, often black but often white, too.

tennessee williams, who was of course culturally very southern, clashed with this cold teutonic wall head on, of course, but also had some terrible family relationships in st. louis, i believe his family basically locked him in barnes hospital as an adult. it was also terribly hard to be a semi-openly gay man during mid-century i imagine...

[goat314]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

it reminds me of a prosaic book i read about german social interaction with the various hard facades and sort of "trust circles." those on the inside were there for life, and those on the outside have an uphill battle - kind of the antithesis to the "new west" kind of american hyper-friendliness that can (at the extreme) dissolve into severe flakiness and lack of long term friendship over time - but also too far the other way. you kind of have swirled into that teutonic wall a southern warmness i've found with people of (obviously) southern roots, often black but often white, too.

tennessee williams, who was of course culturally very southern, clashed with this cold teutonic wall head on, of course, but also had some terrible family relationships in st. louis, i believe his family basically locked him in barnes hospital as an adult. it was also terribly hard to be a semi-openly gay man during mid-century i imagine...

Yes, St. Louis has never been a friendly town to me. I've never gotten that perception living there. I think it's a surprise to outsiders imagining a genteel, easy going, Southern town, then they come and find a very standoffish, abrasive, suspicious, cold city. I notice it more every time I leave sunny Florida and visit family there, but it kind of lines up with my theory about the further North you go the colder the people get, by the time you get up to Chicago and Boston....you're in the Matrix and eye contact is rare.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by goat314

by the time you get up to Chicago and Boston....you're in the Matrix and eye contact is rare.

That's a strange observation from where I sit because I can't tell you how many times I've had visitors to chicago, both foreign and domestic, tell me about how friendly and down to earth chicagoans are.

[goat314]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

That's a strange observation from where I sit because I can't tell you how many times I've had visitors to chicago, both foreign and domestic, tell me about how friendly and down to earth chicagoans are.

Chicago and friendly should never be used in the same sentence. Not saying they're aren't friendly Chicagoans, but that's the last personality type I think of when I think of Chicago. Then again I am a black male, so that may shape my perception of Chicago and other cities I've visited.

[Pedestrian]

“It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears
is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess
all the attractions of the next world”

Oscar Wilde