city

If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else.""Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?_ asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air. My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, __isgusting cardboard it is!

You know, sometimes I think this is just not it,_ he said, his glasses flashing from the early night__ light. He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.__ou know what I mean, Tom?_ he asked. __t__ just not.

Really, nobody was there?_ I asked.__ell, nobody important,_ he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking.

Do you want to achieve something or do you just want to make money?_ asked a nearby man in a white shirt to another man in a striped shirt. I waited for the answer as I slowly walked past them. __hy is it an either or question?_ the man in the striped shirt finally murmured philosophically under a sip of beer. They both stood there looking at each other in thought.

Don__ you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world?_ asked Connor irrelevantly.

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..

I would describe the distinction between city and landscape like this: cities tend to excite and agitate me; they make me feel big or small, self-confident, proud, curious, excited, tense, annoyed... or they intimidate me. But the landscape, if I give it the chance, offers me freedom and serenity. Nature has a different sense of time. Time is big in the landscape while in the city it is condensed, just like the city's space.

A little tranquil lake is more significant to my life than any big city in the world

But you__e out of another world old kid _ You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.

I__ still lonely and it__ a glorification of something I__ not finished with. I don__ want to be distracted from my work by other people, but the absence of it all distracts me from my work and that__ why I run towards the city, to get a little glimpse of it.

Lisbon, to me, is the Lisbon of Pessoa. Just like London is Woolf__, or rather, Mrs. Dalloway__. Barcelona is Gaudí's and Rome is da Vinci__. You see them in every crevice and hear their echoes in every cathedral. I__ like to be the child, or rather, the mother of a city but I neither have a home nor a resting place. My race is humankind. My religion is kindness. My work is love and, well, my city is the walls of your heart.

Do you know what you get when you try to escape? When you drive for miles in a deserted city or swim for hours in a shoreless sea? You get yourself.

I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios . . . We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. __hat__ the point?_ he said. __ids aren__ getting jobs._ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.

Look, girls know when they__e cute,_ he said. __ou don__ have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn__ have a job. I was like, __ow are you going to get a job there in this market?_ And she__ like, ____l wink and I__l smile._ She__ a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.