Quotes & Sayings About City Squares

Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life! — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Certain formalities. It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the treasure to the post. — Anton Chekhov

Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium ...
Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Well you know I'm very supportive of what the Tea Party is trying to do. They're very concerned with spending, the deficit, the bailouts, you know all of those kinds of things. But I really think that the strength of the Tea Party is being a grassroots movement. — John Boozman

The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares. — John Ruskin

City squares are planned absences - they're defined, first of all, by what they're not [George Packer, "History: Influence on Humanity"]. — Catie Marron

He decided that the time had come to decide what he would make of his life. He went, that night, to the roof of his tenement and looked at the lights of the city, the city where he did not run things. He let his eyes move slowly from the windows of the sagging hovels around him to the windows of the mansions in the distance. There were only lighted squares hanging in space, but he could tell from them the quality of the structures to which they belonged; the lights around him looked muddy, discouraged; those in the distance were clean and tight. He asked himself a single question: what was there that entered all those houses, the dim and the brilliant alike, what reached into every room, into every person? They all had bread. Could one rule men through the bread they bought? They had shoes, they had coffee, they had ... The course of his life was set. — Ayn Rand

Security here in New York City is still very tight. Hookers in Times Square now are demanding two forms of fake ID. — David Letterman

I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream ... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home. — F Scott Fitzgerald

They were now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark shapes of ships at anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser. — Virginia Woolf

Ask yourself whether our language is complete
whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position. — Christopher Marlowe

America as did with Israel with its blessing has been turning away from God driving Him out of its public squares. Bring in idols in its place and calling what is evil good and what is good evil ... The glory of the city on the hill is fading and America now stands in danger of impending judgment, and we all know it. — Jonathan Cahn

Sometimes, with the scale of a film, it's like when I walked on the sets of "The Matrix," especially in "Reloaded," there was the city square, or in "Revolutions" with some of the machine world, you're like, "Wow, this is a big playground," which is fun to watch. But the acting experience and the collaborating and creating the world, working on the piece, they're the same joys. — Keanu Reeves

This city has many public squares, in which are situated the markets and other places for buying and selling. — Hernan Cortes

Most people are not valued. Very few people have someone who believes in them. Very few have others love them unconditionally. Do these things intentionally every day. — John C. Maxwell

Fred Wilson is a legendary VC and the Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures in New York City. At AVC, he writes one of the most popular startup blogs and covers issues from negotiation to hiring to fundraising. He's a machine for dispensing helpful advice and insightful commentary for those in our industry. — Emerson Spartz

Yesterday when I got off the bus, I walked to your taxicab first. I was attracted to the black-and-white squares along the roof and the bright green paint, but otherwise, there wasn't any reason for my choice, was there?"
"No," he said.
"Was there a reason that you were at the bus station rather than somewhere else in the city?"
"I guess not."
"This is the charming coincidence. When things in the world that are unconnected suddenly connect, and a pattern emerges."
He exhaled. "But what if the pattern wasn't what you'd call charming?"
"It's not the pattern that's charming," she said. "It's that there is a pattern at all. — Lisa Tucker

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been. — Norman Foster

I've been on Wall Street once in my life in 1980 as a tourist. I went to see the stock exchange when I was 18 years old. I'm not a Wall Street lawyer, I'm a Stanwix Street lawyer. Stanwix Street is a street in downtown Pittsburgh. — Keith Rothfus

I think one of the things I was shocked about was how interested the world is in 'American Idol' and how people, writers, they write about 'Idol' all the time, and I guess I didn't expect that. — Nicki Minaj

What you want is within reach. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx. — James Baldwin

I stand by this man (President George W. Bush). I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound.. with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world. — Stephen Colbert

Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists. — Samuel Johnson

Seville never had a rich chess tradition. Valencia is entirely different, it is enough to say that one of the city squares is named after me. — Anatoly Karpov

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist. — Tim O'Brien

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity ... — Louis Aragon

Don't bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars — Ernest Hemingway,

All right, New York City! Welcome to Madison ... Square ... Jericho! And after tonight, when I become the true, undisputed Intercontinental champion, the Jerichoholics of the Big Apple will throw a celebration party that will make the millennium bash in Times Square look like my sister's seventh birthday party! It'll be a celebration so huge, so grandiose, so spectacular, that it will never, EEEEEEEEVER, be forgotten again! — Chris Jericho

On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice. — Albert Camus

The most remarkable thing about Hollywood is that it does not exist ... Hollywood, in a word, has no center, never had one, no city hall, court house, church, square, or rather it probably has some of those but they're so aimlessly thrown in with the general jumble ... that I, for one, never found them. — Vicki Baum

They knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice since their arrival - became irritated by the cloying susceptibilities of the other, and they would continue to explore the twisting alleyways and sudden squares in silence, and with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other's presence. — Ian McEwan

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there ... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. — Ezra Pound

I'm starving. When we check into our hotel, let's ask the desk clerk where we can find one of those vast pizzas."
"What are you talking about?"
"Your guidebook says Florence is a city of vast pizzas. Look it up yourself."
"Those are vast piazzas, not pizzas! It means public squares!"
Dan's face fell. "Oh."
Amy sighed. "I honestly thought the clue hunt took the dweeb out of you. No such luck. — Gordon Korman

The idea (for the painting 'Room in New York', 1932, ed.) had been in my mind a long time before I painted it. It was suggested by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night, probably near the district where I live (Washington Square, New York, fh) although it's no particular street or house, but is really a synthesis of many impressions. — Edward Hopper