Country Over City Quotes & Sayings

Oh, take the liberty! That's what I would have done if Ethan and Mattie had run off together and left me on this forsaken farm. I would have packed my satchel and my portmanteau and climbed aboard a train bound West, and gazed out the window at what there was to see across this vast country. City spires in the midst of wheatfields, and miles of chards with fruit on the bough, and high bridges over broad rivers, and mountains of clouds the likes of which I'd never seen, and birds of a kind I'd never seen before. And there'd be a city where I'd stay, and there'd be an old couple in a fine house of many rooms, and I'd tend them and see
they kept neat, and on my days off I'd wind my black hair in a fashionable way with tortoiseshell combs, and hold my head high, and go out to see what that city had to offer. — Gina Berriault

Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates. — John Ruskin

This country belongs to all of us. We made this country from nothing, from mud-flats ... Over 100 years ago, this was a mud-flat, swamp. Today, this is a modern city. Ten years from now, this will be a metropolis. Never fear! — Mr. Lee

I've learned over the years that geography is not that important, except that I seem to work better in the country than the city. I get more done. There's just less happening around me, and I have more time and concentration to work on music. — Steve Reich

The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back? — Leigh Brackett

Depends on the dog. Big country dogs like these? Yeah. It's the fancy city ones that give me trouble. Overbred, Dad says. Makes them skittish and screws up their wiring. I had a Chihuahua attack me last year." He showed me a faint scar on his hand. "Took a good chunk out."
I sputtered a laugh. "A Chihuahua?"
"Hey, that thing was more vicious than a pit bull. I was at a park with Simon, kicking around a ball. All of a sudden, this little rat dog comes tearing out of nowhere, jumps up, and clamps down on my hand. Wouldn't let go. I'm shaking it, and the owner's yelling at me not to hurt little Tito. I finally get the dog off. I'm bleeding all over that place and the guy never even apologizes. — Kelley Armstrong

Where you can starve to death in safety," I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, even in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you. When I was younger, I scared my mother to death, the things I would blurt out about District 12, about the people who rule our country, Panem, from the far-off city called the Capitol. Eventually I understood this would only lead us to more trouble. So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts. Do my work quietly in school. Make only polite small talk in the public market. Discuss little more than trades in the Hob, which is the black market where I make most of my money. Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food — Suzanne Collins

I like the fog that creeps over the whole city every night about five, and the warm protective feeling it gives ... and lights of San Francisco at night, the fog horn, the bay at dusk and the little flower stands where spring flowers appear before anywhere else in the country ... But, most of all, I like the view of the ocean from the Cliff House. — Irene Dunne

Vinny was flying on Learjets all over the country to gamble. The fact is, Vinny Gorgeous was the mirror image of John Gotti. The two mob bosses were degenerate gamblers. Vinny even got himself barred from Atlantic City. — Dominick Cicale

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have."
He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly."
"Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing.
"City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating. — Lauren Oliver

A range of studies shows there is no evidence immigrants commit more crime than native-born Americans. In fact, first generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans. The two cities in this country most impacted by undocumented immigrants, you would think of the New York City with over 500,000 and Los Angeles, with a similar amount. Both those cities are among the safest in the free world. — Geraldo Rivera

New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that's who I am. — Delia Ephron

The key 'subtle influences' were enumerated as: the rise of the city over the countryside, the loss of Britons' maritime skills, the growth of refinement and luxury, the absence of literary taste, the decline of the physical form of Britons, the decay of the country's religious life, excessive taxation, false systems of education and, finally, the inability of the British to defend their empire. — Charles Emmerson

The larger point is this: We've invested over half a billion dollars in New York since this department was stood up. We've given New York more money, by more than double, than any other city in the country. — Michael Chertoff

Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale. — Susan Orlean

The city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were dammed off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.
Until it was no more.
Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone.
The birth of a city ... It had become the death of a world. — Charles Beaumont

It's hard to believe, but before manufacturing went to Asia, New York City was an industrial powerhouse. In the thirties and forties, seventy-five percent of women's clothes in the country were made right here between Sixth and Ninth Avenues, from Forty-Second down to Thirtieth. They were stitched up and put on racks and then rolled over to Macy's on Thirty-Fourth for sale. Everything was centered around Penn Station, so people from out of town could come in and shop. The garment district here is why New York's fashion industry still leads the world and Seventh Avenue means fashion. — James Patterson

Flight attendants all over the world saw 'Sex and the City.' Doesn't matter what country you are in. The flight attendants know Jack Berger. — Ron Livingston

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. — Isabel Wilkerson

They haven't killed us yet, I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it.
If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit.
This is the way the world is made now. — Lauren Oliver

Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushrooms
in the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter.
Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don't defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.
They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious ...
Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me. — Hilary Mantel

Brothers and sisters, our democracy has been hijacked. Brothers and sisters, all electoral freedoms in this country are over so long as it's controlled by corporations. Brothers and sisters, we are not going to allow these streets to be taken over by the Democrats or the Republicans. Because it's all of us who have built this city, and we can tear it down unless they give us what we need. — Zack De La Rocha

The country robs a thinking person of everything and gives him virtually nothing, whereas the city is perpetually giving. One has simply to see this, and of course feel it, but very few either see it or feel it, with the result that most people are sentimentally drawn to the country, where in no time they are inevitably sucked dry, deflated, and destroyed. The mind cannot develop in the country; it can develop only in the city, yet today everyone flees from the city to the country because people are basically too indolent to use their minds, on which the city makes the greatest demands, and so they choose to perish surrounded by nature, admiring it without knowing it, instead of seizing upon all the benefits the city has to offer, which have increased and multiplied quite miraculously over the years, and never more so than in recent years. — Thomas Bernhard

(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods. — Truman Capote

My London constituency in Hackney has one of the highest levels of gun crime in the country. But the problem is no longer confined to inner city areas. Gun crime has spread to communities all over Britain. — Diane Abbott

Her first really great role, the one that cemented the "Jean Arthur character," was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra's rendition of Kaufman and Hart's You Can't Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). "Jean Arthur is my favorite actress," said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. " ... push that neurotic girl ... in front of the camera ... and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress." Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice. — Eve Golden

Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister's shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society. — Shirley Jackson

Just as the towering myth of Abraham Lincoln - honest backwoods lawyer, spinner of yarns, righter of wrongs - tells only part of the truth, so, too, is the myth of America woefully incomplete. The country that Ronald Reagan once called "a shining city upon a hill" has, in fact, been tangled up in darkness since before she was born. Millions of souls have graced the American stage over the centuries, played parts both great and small, and made their final exits. But of all the souls who witnessed America's birth and growth, who fought in her finest hours, and who had a hand in her hidden history, only one soul remains to tell the whole truth. What follows is the story of Henry Sturges. What follows is the story of an American life. — Seth Grahame-Smith

This is the first time for the girl, a
time of revelation.
Mysteries unravel at this height,
patterns emerge.
She stands woman--tall, shoulder to shoulder,
with the sun and laughs to think that
such a splendid world had ever frightened her.
All that she sees, farm and forest, pasture and
prairie, city and country, and continent,
stretches before her like tomorrows filled with promise . . .
She was born to this kingdom.
In time it will be hers to explore, to
make her own.
One climb is over, another just beginning.
She is rich in days, wealthy in possibilities.
And here in this crowning moment,
For the very first time . . .

She knows. — Edward Cunningham

Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare upreaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run. And what it did to Northern forests can hardly be described, considering that it iced the branches of the sycamores on Chrystie Street and swept them back and forth until they rang like ranks of bells. — Mark Helprin

Safety Zone = Children of their own homes, gardens, streets, city, country, and all over the world. — Mehmet Kececi

It sounds really over the top to say you're responsible for the city of New York, but I do feel responsibility to the city of New York, to this country, to people everywhere. So many people were affected by the events of September 11, and I feel this is one of the ways that that event will be understood and defined. — Michael Arad

Senegal had always boasted one of Africa's most vibrant merchant cultures. The country's boubou-wearing traders had long colonized street corners in New York and many a European city, where they sold clothing, gadgetry, and assorted tourist fare. But in 2004, Dakar's traders woke up suddenly to the alarming notion that they were in turn being colonized by Chinese who seemed to be taking over the retail sector. Large protests followed in Dakar, with the striking Senegalese traders demanding government action to protect them from the Chinese newcomers. From — Howard W. French

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries. — Amanda Craig

Next I want to try living apart together, live in the same country, the same city, even the same building as whomever I'm in a relationship with, yet in a different apartment than him. Then it would be possible to pay him visits and still invite good friends over to my place. Do you think you have that it takes to maintain such a French arrangement? he asked. Well, no, probably not...but then again...? Maybe it would be better in the long run to stay in a more lasting relationship and not need to move so often. — Oddny Eir

Over the course of the 1970s conservatives made the endangered child into a kind of political and rhetorical abstraction, a way of thinking about the country and its citizens that could help advance a wide range of policy initiatives. They opposed the counterculture on the grounds that rock and roll caused adolescents to lose respect for family life. They promoted the War on Drugs with racially tinged morality tales about addicted inner-city mothers and, crucially, the "superpredator" "crack babies" to whom those mothers supposedly gave birth. (That particular epidemic was later shown to be a myth.)40 And when Anita Bryant led a campaign to allow Dade County to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring teachers for public schools, she named the effort "Save Our Children." The fear that tied all of these campaigns together was of the ease with which children could be victimized or else corrupted and turned against the society that was supposed to nurture them. — Richard Beck

The Jews celebrate Passover by eating unpalatable food to remind them what will happen to their people if they ever leave New York City. The traditional meal often includes gefilte fish. For those of you who don't know what gefilte fish is, it strongly resembles a ball of tuna fish that has been passed nasally. It's not good. During Passover, the angel of death passed over the Jews - an event that, up until the late 1950s, was re-enacted every year by Ivy League colleges and suburban country clubs. — Jon Stewart

The population of every country is nowadays a collection of
diasporas. Every sizable city is now an aggregate of ethnic, religious,
and lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing insiders
from outsiders is a hotly contested issue, while the right to
draw that line, to keep it intact and make it unassailable, is
the prime stake in the skirmishes over influence and battles
for recognition that follow. — Zygmunt Bauman

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life - into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood. — Tim O'Brien

Although she's miles away, still I remember spending that December, staring at the sounds she made with her breath. And when I asked what it was she was up to "five foot nothing" came from her cracked honky-tonk lips and from a calico bonnet monstrous curls unfurled like apple-blossoms scattering about into the back-country. And wreaths of snowflakes swarmed over the hems of her garments and wandered with us into the ether on John F. Kennedy Avenue, and mingled in the traffic. While she held my head together like Jackie Onassis.
Although she's miles away, still I remember her pinning roses to a lapel and the icicles that hung upon the city when I told her "I may not be a handsome man and I probably don't have what it takes to make you forget for long, but know that I'm grateful we had this little drink and a dance before I'm sent ony way." Down John F. Kennedy Avenue, thumbing to Dallas. She held my head together
Like Jackie Onassis. — Valentine Xavier

Coming from a little suburban town, I wasn't a hip city kid. I was quite the opposite, really. Songs like 'Saturday's Kids' rang a bell for kids all over the country. That song was about the kids I grew up with. — Paul Weller