E. B. White Quotes

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

The freedom of the city is the freedom of expression and the freedom of the mind. So precious is this freedom that the citizens judge the city's squalor for its promise .... It is in the nature of great cities to be dangerous, just as it is in the nature of the future to be dangerous.

I love London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris - there are a million places I could imagine I like, but N.Y. is home.

Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.

I've reported murders, scandals, marriages, premieres and national political conventions. I've been amused, intrigued, outraged, enthralled and exasperated by Chicago. And I've come to love this American giant, viewing it as the most misunderstood, most underrated city in the world. There is none other quite like my City of Big Shoulders.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

I love New York City. I love that I get to live there and I love everything about it.

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

The city mouse lives in a house, The garden mouse lives in a bower

New York, hands down. I don't want to be there in the winter, but even then it's an amazing place.

People who grew up in New York City or Los Angeles tend not to even understand what goes on in the rest of the country. I'm really glad to have grown up in an environment where I actually was kind of a weirdo because I was obsessed with comedy and movies and stuff.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

Manchester's got everything except a beach.

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses.

The city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion.

Mid-'80s in New York was fantastic. I remember my first Gay Pride parade in the city. Where I grew up was very sheltered, so when I got to the city, there was this freedom and so much happening. At the same time, there was this pressure of AIDS and everything else. New York is so different today.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Through that windshield I saw a city that didn’t know it was hungry and a reflection of a guy who was FREE.

When you live in a city with no stars to wish on, you have to wish on each other.

It is hard not to be inspired when you're living in New York. It doesn't matter what you do. I think that there is so much going on in this city. I like walking around or taking the subway, thinking about all the history here, looking at the architecture and all the people; of course, the museums. It's tough to find a better place to live.