city

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

Installing massive amounts of wireless devices into every city may eventually be proven to be a global weather modification system.

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

When you looked out my window you could see the whole city crouched under a blanket of car smog.

The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?

Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don__ 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__ a leaf or two it__l be represented.

We'll start to forget a place once we left it

To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.

I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, But my heart was full of my new love's glory, My eyes were laughing and unafraid.I met one who had loved me madly And told his love for all to hear -- But we talked of a thousand things together, The past was buried too deep to fear.I met the other, whose love was given With never a kiss and scarcely a word -Oh, it was then the terror took me Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die - but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years_I went back to the clanging city, I went back where my old loves stayed, My heart was full of my new love's glory, - But my eyes were suddenly afraid.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.

No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn__ necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that__ that.

If there were such a thing as an inter-city thieving contest, Ankh-Morpork would bring home the trophy and probably everyone__ wallets.

The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.