City Light Quotes & Sayings

Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light? Or just another lost angel ... City of Night? — Jim Morrison

We took a cab to the hotel. We looked at each other on the way but neither of us spoke. I checked us in, and when we got to the room, we left the lights off. It seemed natural that we should walk over to the enormous windows, where we watched the urban mass of Shinjuku twinkling in the violet light around us. I looked out at the city from my lofty perch and thought of all the events that had led to this precise instant, this moment I had imagined and ridiculously longed for so many times and that I was now trying to savor even as I felt it slipping irrevocably away. At some point I felt her looking at me. I turned and reached out, tracing the outline of her face and neck with the back of my fingers, trying to burn all the details into my mind, wanting to have them with me later when she would be gone. — Barry Eisler

My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation. — Andrew O'Hagan

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed. — Ernest Hemingway,

It was Jesse. Again. He came by every day and yelled up to my window. I never answered. Tonight my light was on, so he knew I was there. He continued to yell, "Hey, Motor City," louder and louder alternating between high voices, low voices, even singing it.
"Shut up!" someone called from a nearby window.
"Get her to come down, and I'll shut up," he yelled back. — Ruta Sepetys

Hassler flips burgers on a grill in the shadow of the remnants of the Seattle Gas Light Company, a collection of rusted cylinders and ironwork that looms in the distance like the ruins of a steampunk skyline. The expanse of emerald grass runs down to the edge of Lake Union, which sparkles under the late afternoon sun. It's June. It's warm. The entire city seems to be out taking advantage of this rare, perfect day. — Blake Crouch

Not even a cat was out. The rain surged down with a steady drone. It meant to harm New York and everyone there. The gutters could not contain it. Long ago they had despaired of the job and surrendered. But the rain paid no attention to them ... New York people never lived in houses or even in burrows. They inhabited cells in stone cliffs. They timed the cooking of their eggs by the nearest traffic light. If the light went wrong, so did the eggs ... — Barbara Newhall Follett

If I freely may discover
What should please me in my lover,
I would have her fair and witty,
Savouring more of court than city;
A little proud, but full of pity;
Light and humorous in her toying,
Oft building hopes, and soon destroying,
Long, but sweet in the enjoying;
Neither too easy nor to hard;
All extremes I would have barr'd. — Ben Jonson

Cleveland, city of light! City of magic! — Randy Newman

Three things I remember: I was in a city so old it did not have a name,; there was a full moon that cast a pale light over buildings unlike any I had ever seen before; and at the end of a long tunnel something was waiting for me. — Jonathan Aycliffe

My whole body felt light, unguarded. I leaned in without even thinking about it, not too much at least, and kissed Dominic's lips. I felt him smile against my mouth and it was like the openness of the bridge and the river and the sky and the city got bigger and more infinite as we pressed together, warming each other, happy. So very happy. Ever after.
That must be what it feels like, to dream of flying. — Vee Hoffman

Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian. — Henry David Thoreau

A city sparkles in the night
How can it glow so bright?
The neighborhoods surround the soft florescent light
Designer skyline in my head
Abstract and still well-read
You went from numbered lines to buildings overhead — Owl City

It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We've spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it - scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.
And what of the rest of the world that's already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star's just dying and we'll never know about it. Somewhere another's being born whose light we'll never see.
The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothing ness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything-all of us-will simply cease to be. — Carrie Ryan

By the time we had passed St Clement Dane's, the pavements had grown less crowded, and as we drew by the Temple, thick woolly clouds of vapour were curling up from the steep lanes leading down to the river on our right and were beginning to suffuse the light from the gas-lamps and to deepen the gloom of the quieter streets of that quarter. Past St Paul's, on through the sepulchral City and up beyond Bishopsgate, the breeze had dropped and the haze grew thicker and heavier. By the time we had arrived at our rendezvous with Lestrade in a warren of dismal backstreets in Spitalfields, we were mired in the drab wraiths of a summer fog. — Seamus Duffy

If one would cancel all traffic rules and switch off all traffic lights, watching city traffic on TV would be also awfully interesting! — Oleg Romanishin

At that hour the moon is almost entirely eaten away; it doesn't know where to go after reaching the city. The sky has to loosen its grip on the earth as day begins to break. The streets run steeply up and down, and the streetcars travel back and forth like rooms ablaze with light. — Herta Muller

How to unravel the knot of reality? Slowly and patiently. You cannot run away from it. You cannot run towards it. Yet truth runs in your footsteps. It is the face in the mirror, the light of the sun, the winter rainstorms, the heat of summer in the city — Frederick Lenz

But they love each other," Clary said, appalled. "Isn't that what love means? That you're supposed to be there for the other person to turn to, no matter what?"
Luke looked toward the river, at the dark water moving slowly under the light of the autumn moon. "Sometimes, Clary," he said, "love just isn't enough. — Cassandra Clare

When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common. — Julie Burchill

Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds. — Salman Rushdie

THE OFFICE FELT SUMPTUOUS EVEN IN NEAR DARKNESS. It reminded me of certain photographs by Edward Steichen: velvet shadows deepening into moody gloom, here and there a form suggested by a reflection of light on a radius of polished wood, the mysterious gleam of Tiffany glass in the pendant shade of a lamp not lit, the room implied rather than revealed, yet known as well as if it had been enraptured by sunshine instead of barely kissed by the ghost light of the haunted city beyond the windows. — Dean Koontz

It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. . . . An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. . . . It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. — Joseph Mitchell

Couples will no longer spend their nights in their houses dedicated to habitation and reception, the customary social reason for banalization. The chamber of love will be more remote from the center of the city: it will completely naturally re-create for the partners the notion of ex-centricity, in a place less open to the light, more hidden, in order to return to the atmosphere of the secret. The contrary move, the search for a center of thought, will proceed by the same technique. — Tom McDonough

Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that's lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won't be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival. — Jay McInerney

May He give us
all the courage that we need
to go the way He shepherds us.
That when He calls
we may go unfrightened.
If He bids us come to Him
across the waters,
that unfrightened we may go.
And if He bids us climb a hill,
may we not notice that it is a hill,
mindful only of
the happiness of His company.
He made us for Himself,
that we should travel with Him
and see Him at the last
in His unveiled beauty
in the abiding city where
He is light
and happiness
and endless home. — Bede Jarrett

If Tao Lin had been born to Gary Shteyngart's parents and spent his early twenties slaving for pageviews at NewYorker, he would have written something like this, the Bright Lights, Big City of the click-here-now generation. — Gideon Lewis-Kraus

But the events that transpired on those various dates did not throw the city of Moscow into upheaval. When the page was torn from the calendar, the bedroom windows did not suddenly shine with the light of a million electric lamps; that Fatherly gaze did not suddenly hang over every desk and appear in every dream; nor did the drivers of a hundred Black Marias turn the keys in their ignitions and fan out into the shadowy streets. For the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, Bukharin's fall from grace, and the expansion of the Criminal Code to allow the arrest of anyone even countenancing dissension, these were only tidings, omens, underpinnings. And it would be a decade before their effects were fully felt. No. — Amor Towles

Plume"

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure - dusky flutter - trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who've engraved on her locket phrases in script: "glide on a blade" and "rustling precedes the shuck." This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it's morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded. — Aaron Shurin

Aligning your body clock to the new environment requires a phase shift. It takes one day per time zone to shift. Advance or retard your body clock as many days before your trip as the number of time zones you'll be crossing. Before traveling east, get into sunlight early in the day. Before traveling west, avoid sunlight early by keeping the curtains drawn, and instead expose yourself to bright light in the evening, to simulate what would be late afternoon sun in your destination. Once you're on the plane, if you're westbound, keep the overhead reading lamp on, even if it is your home bedtime. When you arrive in the western city, exercise lightly by taking a walk in the sun. That sunlight will delay the production of melatonin in your body. If you're on an eastbound plane, wear eye shades to cover your eyes two hours or so before sunset in your destination city, to acclimate yourself to the new "dark" time. — Daniel J. Levitin

I don't hate you, Jace."
"I don't hate you, either."
She looked up at him, relieved. "I'm glad to hear that - "
"I wish I could hate you," he said. His voice was light, his mouth curved in an unconcerned half smile, his eyes sick with misery. "I want to hate you. I try to hate you. It would be so much easier if I did hate you. Sometimes I think I do hate you and then I see you and I - "
Her hands had grown numb with their grip on the blanket. "And you what?"
"What do you think?" Jace shook his head. "Why should I tell you everything
about how I feel when you never tell me anything? It's like banging my head on a
wall, except at least if I were banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop."
Clary's lips were trembling so violently that she found it hard to speak. "Do you think it's easy for me?" she demanded. — Cassandra Clare

A cool white, wintry light glazed the buildings on the highest hill: Will's memorial, the unsightly chimney from the hospital, the modernist cathedral in Clifton. The jumble of styles and eras lent the city the semblance of a medieval Roman town. Laura drove the long way round, up past the Clifton Suspension Bridge, strung like an a engineer's dream over a river sinking into the mud. Leigh Woods was on the far side, the trees dark, bereft of leaves, clawing at the sky. — Sanjida Kay

Mission and missions must be the consuming passion of the whole church of God and not the exclusive domain of an elite missionary regiment. Only then will the church be like a city set on a hill which cannot be hidden. Only then will the fullest meaning of mission as the light of God be realized. — John Mark Terry

Mother." Alec's voice as he interrupted his mother was firm, implacable, and not
unkind. "Father. There's something I have to tell you." He smiled at them. "I'm seeing someone."
Robert Lightwood looked at his son with some exasperation. "Alec," he said.
"This is hardly the time."
"Yes, it is. This is important. You see, I'm not just seeing anyone." Words
seemed to be pouring out of Alec in a torrent, while his parents looked on in
confusion. Isabelle and Magnus were staring at him with expressions of nearly identical astonishment. "I'm seeing a Downworlder. In fact, I'm seeing a war - "
Magnus's fingers moved, quick as a flash of light, in Alec's direction. There was a faint shimmer in the air around Alec - his eyes rolled up - and he dropped to the floor, felled like a tree. — Cassandra Clare

To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour. From where the Celestial Gaze is situated, from that high above, all these sporadically lit bulbs must seem in perfect harmony, constantly flickering, as if coding a cryptic message to God. — Elif Shafak

I moved from a mountain with one traffic light to New York City when I was 17, and it was an amazing, eye opening, creative adventure. I would walk through the streets of Manhattan looking up at these huge buildings, amazed that I didn't know a single person in any of them. — Rachel Boston

It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark, heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodie's masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman's folly, and she never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie silly. — Muriel Spark

I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.
Sincerely yours,
P. Soames — Mark Helprin

i do not want to have you to fill the empty parts of me i want to be full on my own i want to be so complete i could light a whole city and then i want to have you cause the two of us combined could set it on fire — Rupi Kaur

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-colored pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapors; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the black end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Landlords - many of whom were absentee, and many were Chinese - hated my guts. They saw me coming and said, 'There's that Communist Ed Lee!'" The housing battles of the 1970s were the crucible for an entire generation of new activists in San Francisco. The city was a finite peninsula of competing dreams and ambitions. Was it to become a Manhattan of the West, whose office towers and high-rise apartment buildings overshadowed everything else, or remain an affordable, human-scale city of light nestled into the hills and hollows? — David Talbot

The creature had nut-brown skin mixed with patches of ash. It was human-sized and formed, but its skin looked like the bark of an old, old tree. About the same height as Donna, it was spindly with arms and legs that were all joints and angles. Its face was narrow and pointed, with hair on top of its head like thick moss and narrow black eyes that glinted even in the dim light of the room. The thing's body was clothed in lichen and moss, with vines twining around its sharp limbs. The creature opened its lipless mouth, a dark slash across its twisted face.

Donna's mind flashed back to the party and the shadow she'd seen sliding through the darkness outside Xan's house. She hadn't been imagining things, after all.

The wood elves had returned to the city. — Karen Mahoney

Far below ran the silver ribbon of the East River, braceleted by shining bridges, flecked by boats as small as flyspecks, splitting the shining banks of light that were Manhattan and Brooklyn on either side. — Cassandra Clare

III
But may I, when alone again I have the city's crush
and tangled noise-skein and the furor
of its traffic all around me,
may I above the mindless swirl
recall sky and the gentle mountain rim
on which the far-off herd curved homeward.
May my spirit be hard as rock
and the shepherd's life to me seem possible-
the way he drifts and turns brown in the sun and with a practiced
stone-throw mends his flock, whenever it frays.
Steps slow, not light, his body pensive,
but in his standing there, majestic. Even now a god
might enter this form and not be lessened.
He lingers for a while, then moves on, like the day itself,
and shadows of the clouds
pass through him, as though space were slowly
thinking thoughts for him. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The city wasn't foggy as always. It was now clear for miles and the skeleton of its frames stuck out brightly in the sun's light. With no sun on the ground, I saw fields of green tall grass. Nature always grows. If a scare is to be had, a new type of skin will inhabit the area. All it takes to have a scare is blood, and blood is all it takes to mend. — Andrew Boyd

She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that's broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate. — Jardine Libaire

The cushions of my friend's couch were some kind of rubberized velour, the windows were uncurtained, and at five a.m. the birds were all atwitter and the light, the L.A. light everyone goes on and on about, was right in my East Coast eyes. Give me New York any day, I thought. But when New York came, it was with fangs and claws, in a nightmare I now woke from screaming. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I paused for a light at Hamilton and TWlfth and noticed the Nissan was running rough at idle. Two blocks later it backfired and stalled. I coaxed it into the center of the city. Ffft, ffft, ffft, KAPOW! Ffft, ffft, ffft, KAPOW!
A Trans Am pulled up next to me at a light. The Trans Am was filled with high school kids. One of them stuck his head out of the passenger-side window.
"Hey lady," he said. "Sounds like you got a fartmobile." I flipped him an Italian goodwill gesture and pulled the ball cap low on my forehead.
(Three to get Deadly) — Janet Evanovich

Freddie is now officially the enemy. His unauthorised presence in the city a tightrope along which he has to walk back and forth every day. The streets bristle with black shirted men carrying guns who believe themselves taller than they are. Everything he carries within himself becomes secret, something that gives off illegal light and heat inside him. Sometimes he feels like a shadow that glows with this light, this heat. — Glenn Haybittle

Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain. — Lucy Foley

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.
It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose. — Dagobert D. Runes

Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that's bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past. — Robert Lanza

It was a child's first memory of light falling through crib bars, the recollected scent of rain and city streets, the pain of unforgotten loss, the sting of remembered humiliation, and the cruel forgetfulness of old age, when the most ancient of memories stand out with agonizingly clear precision and the nearest of incidents are lost beyond recall. — Cassandra Clare

You were going into the Light city without a pass?" Ethan said. "That's a crime."
"I guess we don't know each other that well yet," Carwyn observed. "It's possibly time to talk about some of my hobbies and interests. One of my hobbies is crime. — Sarah Rees Brennan

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes. I slept on the ground in the light of the moon. On the edge of the city you'll see us and then, we come with the dust and we go with the wind. — Woody Guthrie

It doesn't take a farm to invoke the iron taste of leaving in your mouth. Anyone who loves a small plot of ground - a city garden, a vacant lot with some guerilla beds, a balcony of pots - understands the almost physical hurt of parting from it, even for a minor stint. I hurt every day I wake up in our city bed, wondering how the light will be changing over the front field or across the pond, whether the moose will be in the willow by the cabin again, if the wren has fledged her young ones yet and we'll return to find the box untended. I can feel where the farm is at any point in my day, not out of some arcane sixth sense developed from years of summer nights out there with the coyotes under the stars, but because of the bond between that earth and this body. Some grounds we choose; some are our instinctive homes. — Jenna Butler

I wish I had covered all my tracks completely cause I'm so afraid
Is that the light at the far end of the tunnel or just the train? — Owl City

Here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures, It throws the city into relief. The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on. — Anthony Doerr

Youths should study,' grumbled the Old Woman, 'and not take the laws apart. And you, dear Youth, before you become acquainted with the Beautiful Woman, take a good look into her Garden through the window tomorrow morning, when everything is clearly and genuinely visible in the light of the sun. You will see that in the Garden there are no flowers which are familiar to anyone here, and only such flowers as none of us in the City know. Just think about this carefully, after all, there is something strange about it. The devil is cunning; is this not his creation for the damnation of people?'
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

Under the warm light cast by the reading lamp, I was plunged into a new world of images and sensations peopled by characters who seemed as real to me as my surroundings. Page after page I let the spell of the story and its world take me over, until the breath of dawn touched my window and my tired eyes slid over the last page. I lay in the bluish half-light with the book on my chest and listened to the murmur of the sleeping city. My eyes began to close, but I resisted. I did not want to lose the story's spell or bid farewell to its characters just yet. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

They have enough testosterone between them, if testosterone were electricity they could light up New York City for the month of August — Janet Evanovich

For London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most autumnal - its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone. There was a charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, "The nights are drawing in," as if it were a spell to invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter. — James Hilton

I stood within the city disinterred;
And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls
Of spirits passng through the streets;
and heard the Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals
Thrill through those roofless halls;
The oracular thunder penetrating shook
The listening soul in my suspended blood. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else's in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north. — Steve Erickson

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again. — Alexander McCall Smith

The sun,
the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man
burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray. — Charles Dickens

At first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blonde; black dresses, white. She's a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl. — Francesca Lia Block

You know, sometimes I think this is just not it," he said, his glasses flashing from the early night's light.
He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.
"You know what I mean, Tom?" he asked. "It's just not. — Daniel Amory

Perhaps when the light of heaven shows us clearly the pitfalls and dangers of the earth road that led to the heavenly city, our sweetest songs of gratitude will be not for the troubles we have conquered, but for those we have escaped. — Amelia Barr

There is no other city as vulgar and obscene as Osaka. We should celebrate the image and welcome the development of casinos and red-light districts to attract people. — Toru Hashimoto

Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the "hill of ages"; and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, "with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned," that shine with an internal light as with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen retreating or advancing to the eye of memory: its streets are paved with the names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles breathe the silence of thought. — William Hazlitt

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. — James G. Frazer

Frodo raised his head, and then stood up. Despair had not left him, but the weakness had passed. He even smiled grimly, feeling now as clearly as a moment before he had felt the opposite, that what he had to do, he had to do, if he could, and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else knew about it was beside the purpose. He took his staff in one hand and the phial in his other. When he saw that the clear light was already welling through his fingers, he thrust it into his bosom and held it against his heart. Then turning from the city of Morgul, now no more than a grey glimmer across a dark gulf, he prepared to take the upward road. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Slowly, his eyes came up and he looked through the kitchen window and out through the Cahuenga Pass. The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance.
Bosch nodded and bent down. He closed his eyes, put his hands under the water and brought them up to his face. The water was cold and bracing, as he thought any baptism, the start of any second chance, should be. — Michael Connelly

Seattle is beautiful. You look at the sky and it's one of the most beautiful skies in the world, and then there's the Puget Sound, which will kill you, if you fall into it, but it's also beautiful. Seattle is a city of contradictions. It's the most liberal and most literate city in America, and it has Starbucks and [Bill] Gates, but it's also where the Green River killer hunted women and where the runaway population is just shocking when you walk the streets. Within the same city, there's darkness and light. — Veena Sud

She loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent, or one time in her room when light from the valley's city, finally free of curfew, rose among them like twilight and lit the colour of his body. — Michael Ondaatje

After living with his art in my own chamber, I saw there was more than mere mimicry, and that art was a world unto itself, with its own symbols and language. A leaf seen in a certain light might be gray or violet as well as purple, and a latticework of twigs might easily turn red as the sky paled above the city. — Alice Hoffman

Sometimes she felt she would like to engulf him like a trap-lantern, and never share him with anyone or anything else again, not even the light. Even his obsession with ruling Caverna pained her, as if the city were a woman, and a rival. — Frances Hardinge

The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel. — Yoon Ha Lee

It was dusk when I drove back into downtown Detroit. I was annoyed by how much traffic there was at that hour of the day. Being a guy with two good legs who doesn't mind ankling, I hadn't realized the car situation had gotten so bad in the city. I almost had two smack-ups with people who refused to yield to me. Then I bumped someone from behind, intentionally, at the new flashing traffic light on Jefferson. The guy in the car had refused to move - he just sat there waiting because the light was red. After I bumped him (not that hard), the squirt hopped out of his car red in the face, and I must admit the sight of him gave me my first laugh in two days. He said, "Can't you see it's a red light?" I told him a red light is just a suggestion. Then I pressed the gas lightly and started pushing his car further out into the intersection whilst he stood there in disbelief. "Better get back in, your car is leaving without you," I said. — W.K. Berger

To save energy, New York City is now dimming the lights of the skyscrapers and the skyline at night. There's a bad side to this. If you need Batman, you have to text him. — David Letterman

All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening. — Victor Hugo

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ... — William Gibson

I had a ritual - and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York - to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings. — Stephanie Danler

I came from the country, and when I came to the city, I was ridin' high, you know. I was seeing more lights than I ever dreamed to shine in the world. 'Cos where I came from, there wasn't too many lights. Bugs made a lot of light, but after that there wasn't no lights. — John Hunter

As we curve around into the loop of the City Circle, I can see that a couple of other stylists have tried to steal Cinna and Portia's idea of illuminating their tributes. The electric-light-studded outfits from District 3, where they make electronics, at least make sense. But what are the livestock keepers from Distric 10, who are dressed as cows, doing with flaming belts? Broiling themselves? Pathetic. — Suzanne Collins

On any given day, half of the subway cars smelled like urine, and attempting to get anywhere on time was nearly impossible. It was stressful to live in the city and I still hadn't found my niche, but I had dreams. One day when I'd paid off my massive pile of student loans and was working for Vogue, I'd move to the Upper East Side and get to experience the city in a whole new light. — R.S. Grey

The stars are out,' Zoe said.
She was right. There were millions of them, with no city lights to ruin turn the sky orange.
'Amazing,' Bianca said. 'I've never actually seen the Milky Way.'
'This is nothing,' Zoe said. 'In the old days, there were more. Whole constellations have disappeared because of human light pollution.'
'You talk like you're not human,' I said.
Zoe raised an eyebrow. I am a Hunter. I care what happens to the wild places of the world. Can the same be said for thee?'
'For you,' Thalia corrected. 'Not thee.'
'But you use you for the beginning of a sentence.'
'And for the end,' Thalia said. 'No thou. No thee. Just you.'
Zoe threw up her hands in exasperation. 'I hate this language. It changes too often! — Rick Riordan

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night
He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing stretching every nerve
I had to listen, had no choice — Peter Gabriel

There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen,
constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark. — Samuel R. Delany

I lived in the city of light for 4 years 10 months, the generosity of sacred souls sustain my livelihood. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Here's another way to put it: You're here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We're going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don't think I'm going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I'm putting you on a light stand. Now that I've put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand - shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you'll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven. — Anonymous

The train station - busy, swarming with people, luggage, porters, taxi drivers and limousine chauffeurs - a giant honeycomb, with worker bees flying in and out, carrying the trash, which covers the entire floor, in and out of the building. Only the honey has been consumed by the selected few, and nothing but the mucus remains. The line - a monstrous larva - the line stretches from the information window and extends almost out of the door. A human worm - hundreds of legs and hands, twisting and breathing disease. What was I thinking? This is just a city like any other, a city with its inhabitants, always busy, from the morning until the nighttime, always itching for a fight, always ready to chew me up and spit me out. A stripped and ragged bone, tossed aside when I can no longer feed its hungry belly. The belly of a beast - a human beast - merciless, yet placatory on the surface. I light a cigarette, spit on the floor, and walk towards the daylight. — Henry Martin

The Stones This is the city where men are mended. I lie on a great anvil. The flat blue sky-circle Flew off like the hat of a doll When I fell out of the light. I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard. The mother of pestles diminished me. I became a still pebble. The stones of the belly were peaceable, The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing. — Sylvia Plath

I have gained very great inspiration from the Cornish land- and seascape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one's sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city. — Barbara Hepworth

Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate ... — Francesco Petrarca

Her mind raced through the dark, throwing open doors, knocking over cabinets, searching for anything it ever remembered seeing. Then the lightning flashed again. Carolina captured it before it even struck land, a jagged scar of silver light suspended over the black chimneys of a sleeping city. She narrowed her eyes at the incomplete bolt until it shimmered and broke. With one sweeping glance, she cast the bits of light across the eastern sky as stars. Thunder roared in her ears and lightning cut the sky again. Her stars held steady over a ghostly desert. Another bolt charged down the night, but she caught it before it could turn the sand to glass, broke it into pieces, and lit the west. — Carey Wallace

Our City has a rich history, even though many tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District. Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most peopke find sin. - taxi driver — John Green

I go down the street, I say hello to everybody, a stranger or otherwise. I know that they do not know me, but I like to say hello and I think they appreciate it. I notice their faces light up with a smile and I believe that if all the people in our great city ... would do that, the whole world would begin to say it is the "Friendly City." You can do a tremendous thing here. We get so absorbed, we do not always speak to our friends. Speak to them, even strangers, you are not going to give offense. — Spencer W. Kimball

It was dark and dim all day. From the sunless dawn until evening the heavy shadow had deepened, and all hearts in the City were oppressed. Far above a great cloud streamed slowly westward from the Black Land, devouring light, borne upon a wind of war; but below the air was still and breathless, as if all the Vale of Anduin waited for the onset of a ruinous storm. — J.R.R. Tolkien