A Quote by Craig Childs

On numerous visits to Manhattan, I have found myself poking around the city trying to find a moment of quiet and once located a hint of it in Central Park during a windless, late-night snowfall. There I stood absolutely still in the lemon glow of the city, a sky full of snow. The city still roared from all sides, a thousand noises compressed down to just one. I counted that distant, mild roar as quiet, a welcome relief from the more pressing noises of the daytime city.
The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.
I sit on the steps in the heat of the sun and listen as one by one these car alarms extinguish themselves until once more only the muted roar of the city is audible, and the city, bathed in sunlight, once again resumes dreaming its collective dream. Cars roll down the city's roads, plants grow from its soil, wealth is generated in its rooms, hope is created and lost and recreated in the minds and souls of its inhabitants, and the city continues its dream and searches for those ideas that will make it strong.
When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban - not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it's all city and big buildings. But now that I'm here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.
I'm in love with cities. I find them amazing, the quiet co-ordination of thousands of people, going about what we're trying to do, and that organism of the city nurturing human aspiration, and the actual city fabric itself being a special thing rather than just infrastructure.
Paris. City of love. City of dreams. City of splendor. City of saints and scholars. City of gaiety. Sink of iniquity.
That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.
New York is still the most glamorous city I've ever been to, but it's starting to feel older. The sirens still wail; the paths in Central Park still pulsate with joggers. The Manhattan schist still trembles beneath your feet. But weirdly, it's starting to feel, dare I say it, a bit quaint.
At 18, I took a Greyhound bus to New York City, and then I was in city after city, so I was just dying to get to the country. Everywhere I'd go, I'd just shoot out to a national park somewhere and reconnect.
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
We may have city lights and the glow of touch screens to obscure our view, but God's world is still near at hand, even right here in New York City where I live.
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have out walked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet. When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly light, One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.
It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.
I decided that if nobody else was going to do anything to rectify this colossal inequity in taxation, I'd have to do it myself. So I instituted a suit against the city of Baltimore demanding that the city assessor be specifically ordered to assess the Church for its vast property holdings in the city, and that the city tax collector then be instructed to collect the taxes once the assessment has been made.
The city is better because the city has an economy of needs and once you're talking about a city, maybe you can start talking about how you manage the climate of that city as a whole. Not by putting a dome over it but by more passive means that can potentially be put together in creative ways.
Israel's capital will never again be a divided city, a city with a wall at its center, a city in which two flags fly. This city, will, in its entirety, absorb immigrants, welcome pilgrims and be the eternal capital of Israel forever.
Violence and hatefulness have never been - nor will they ever be - who we are. This is the city I was born in, the city I was raised in and the city I love. Portland is also a united city.
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