Distant City Quotes & Sayings

On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life. Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky about the rooftops. A sky shimmery with the possibilities of the death; lights exaggerated, the heavens peeled back- a swirling haze of nebulae and comets - in some distant place, intimations of the new beginning into which he would soon journey — Oscar Hijuelos

Into no other city does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane: - and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic. — Robert Louis Stevenson

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. — Don DeLillo

The water glittered under the moon's careful watch, and, in the distance, steeples cut stark black silhouettes into the landscape of the distant city. — Katherine McIntyre

We would fight not for the political future of a distant city, rather for principles whose destruction would ruin the possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the earth. — Neville Chamberlain

Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Each day, we feel more distant from each other, more alone, all while being surrounded by millions. Each day we watch as our city turns into a desert, one in which we are all lost, looking for that oasis we like to call "love". The more we wait, the more everything and everyone looks like a grain of sand escaping between our fingers before vanishing into the wind. How do we find something or someone we can no longer see, but which is right there before us? And how do we hold on to what is most precious in life? — Gabriel Ba

Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons. — Kim Stanley Robinson

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city. — Italo Calvino

Don't laugh, it's people like her who make this lousy
world a place worth visiting.'
'Whores?'
'No. We're all whores, sooner or later. I mean
good-hearted people. And don't look at me like that. Weddings turn me to jelly.'
We remained there embracing that special silence, gazing at the reflections on the water. After a while dawn tinged the sky with amber, and Barcelona woke up. We heard the distant bells from the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, just emerging from the mist on the other side of the harbour.
'Do you think Carax is still there, somewhere in the
city?' I asked.
'Ask me another question.'
'Do you have the rings?'
Fermin smiled. 'Come on, let's go. They're waiting for us, Daniel. Life is waiting for us. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life's worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, Law school was over at last! — Daniel Amory

I could hear only the slight murmur of the city, faint and rhythmic as the breaking of waves on a distant shore. The statues glistened in the moonlight, and in the early morning hours the wind sometimes wafted the spicy aroma of vegetables from the near-by Halles. — Anonymous

City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished. The second, and much longer, part of each song would then tell of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back. All this lay in the planet's remote past. — Douglas Adams

That is true. But nevertheless, you are like the prisoners in the cave, your legs and necks shackled by your maps and your walls so that all you can see is the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave. You think they are the truth, but they are only a shadow of the truth, which lies - " He gestured to the sky and the plain and the distant spiral curl that was the growing city of Sarai. " - out here, under the gaze of the sun and the moon and the stars. — Kate Elliott

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. — Johan Huizinga

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest. — Victor Hugo

Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died. — Cory Doctorow

The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness. — Maya Angelou

I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it
a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you? — Adam Gopnik

A steady exposure to distant human need that is beyond our personal response can gradually inoculate us against particular action ... Isolation from local need, and overexposure to overwhelming but distant need, make our responses to strangers uncertain and tentative at best.
We need to find or create contemporary equivalents of the city gate, community rituals, and small group meetings in which we can build preliminary relations with strangers. — Christine Pohl

Somewhere deeper in the city a motor is running, a distant, earthy growl, like an animal panting. in a few hours the bright blush of morning will push through all that darkness, and shapes will reassert themselves, and people will wake up and yawn and brew coffee and get ready for work, everything the same as usual. Life will go on. Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going. — Lauren Oliver

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. — Craig Childs

Only by embracing the lessons embedded in our city's history can we avoid repeating the failed policies of both the recent and distant past, and have true clarity about what action is required to correct today's public policies. Recurring themes emerge throughout the history of New York City with regards to public policy. Even though the city has changed immensely, these themes are important for debating policy and giving us an informed perspective on how to move forward. — Ralph Da Costa Nunez

When I'm awake all night, sometimes I see the people and the city waking up around me. I feel a little bit moody at them for stepping into my night-time. What I want is that feeling when you're in the rain, or a storm. It's a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer - like it's just for you. Like hearing rain or a whale-song, a cry in the dark, the far cry. — Burial

He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past - a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy. — Daphne Du Maurier

Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest. — Victor Hugo

Now, though, the command he gave made two vaguenesses congeal into one threat, distant, amorphous, but unmistakable, as when, against a background of city dawn and back alley clatter, one click and one clack come together into the telltale click-clack of a ready gun, and echo won't tell you whether the enemy's perch is left, or right, or high, or low, only that it is near. — Ada Palmer

Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses. — Sam Harris

Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the roar of an occasional "L" train, and the hollow echo of the footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has never been done satisfactorily. — Edna Ferber

That's a sweet piece," said Jean, briefly forgetting to be aggravated. "You didn't snatch that off a street."
"No," said Locke, before taking another deep draught of the warm water in the decanter. "I got it from the neck of the governor's mistress."
"You can't be serious."
"In the governor's manor."
"Of all the -"
"In the governor's bed."
"Damned lunatic!"
"With the governor sleeping next to her."
The night quiet was broken by the high, distant trill of a whistle, the traditional swarming noise of city watches everywhere. Several other whistles joined in a few moments later.
"It is possible," said Locke with a sheepish grin, "that I have been slightly too bold. — Scott Lynch

That distant day had a significance I could not give it then. So we wheeled and came back south towards the city. The Temple of Heaven slipped by underneath, that perfect pattern in its ample park. Then the wide plain ruled to the far horizon. Soon the aerodrome. — Cecil Arthur Lewis

They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun. — Cormac McCarthy

I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild. — Eleanor Catton

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

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love. — George Eliot

Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas. — Woodrow Wilson

The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes. — Douglas Adams

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute. — Czeslaw Milosz

I did not matter what distant iron city had raised him. He had been made by Sorry-in-the-Vale, his bones as much a part of it as the valley and the woods. It was as if she had the whole town spread underneath her. Or the whole world, since right then he was the only part of it that mattered. — Sarah Rees Brennan

As the serpentine expanse of glass drew open, the city seemed to wrap around them: rooftop gardens with stunted trees in pots, water towers like chunky flying saucers, the spires of distant skyscrapers. — Scott Westerfeld

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were. — Garrison Keillor

Bowman, too, had been born in a great city, in the French Hospital in Manhattan, in the burning heat of August and very early in the morning when all geniuses are born, as Pearson once told him. There had been an unbreathing stillness, and near dawn faint, distant thunder. It grew slowly louder, then gusts of cooler air before a tremendous storm broke with lightning and sheets of rain, and when it was over, — James Salter

The world is going under, I thought, and this notion so little surprised me, it seemed as though I had been waiting a long time for just that to happen. But now, from amid the burning and collapsing city, I saw a boy come toward me. His hands were buried in his pockets and he hopped and skipped from one leg to another, resilient and light-hearted. Then he stopped and emitted an ingenious whistle
our signal from grade school days, and the boy was my friend who had shot himself when he was a student. Immediately I too became, like him, a boy of twelve, and the burning city and the distant thunder and the blustering storm of howling voices from all corners of the world sounded wondrously exquisite to our newly awakened ears. Now everything was good, and the dark nightmare in which I had lived for so many despairing years was gone forever. — Hermann Hesse

I was dreaming about this - except it feels even better than I thought it would. Fucking fantastic. Clean sheets. You"

Warrick moved across and kissed him gently, exactly as he'd imagined. Soft cotton and warm skin against him, soothing and luxurious. Hand on his back, touching carefully. He had a moment of fear that this was the dream, that soon he would wake up in the cell. Then a noise distracted him: distant firing in the city. He tensed, and Warrick's hand stroked a circle over his shoulder-blade. More firing, but it was nothing to do with him. Nothing to worry about, even if he could manage it. Safe, here.

He recaptured the tail end of a thought, before it disappeared into sleep. "Just you. 'S enough."

If Warrick said anything in reply, Toreth didn't hear it. — Manna Francis

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on. — Beatriz Williams

O how all things are far removed
and long have passed away.
I do believe the star,
whose light my face reflects,
is dead and has been so
for many thousand years.
I had a vision of a passing boat
and heard some voices saying disquieting things.
I heard a clock strike in some distant house ...
but in which house? ...
I long to quiet my anxious heart
and stand beneath the sky's immensity.
I long to pray ...
And one of all the stars
must still exist.
I do believe that I would know
which one alone
endured,
and which like a white city stands
at the ray's end shining in the heavens. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Frequently I go to conferences and listen to speakers decry the absent father as somehow a new phenomenon. Though their recriminations against absent or emotionally distant fathers are generally meant to help society, at the same time they are built on a lie that evolution disproves generation after generation. Fathers have often gone to war, or the long hunt on the savannah, or to work in another village or city. But only in the last decade or so have manhood and fathering been trashed completely. — Michael Gurian

He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough — Will Self

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

Like most Istanbul Turks I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with the Hagia Sophia and the red brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away. — Orhan Pamuk

Venice took on the feeling of a city paved with black glass, the odd lantern, torch, or candle reflecting in the canals like distant windows into hell, the crescent moon throwing silver scythes across the water where it could find its way between buildings. — Christopher Moore

Only a few miles from any city centre one would find oneself already in the backwoods, where there were bandits living in the forests, where roads turned into muddy bogs in spring, and where the external signs of life in the remote hamlets had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. Yet, despite living so close to the peasants, the educated classes of the cities knew next to nothing about their world. It was as exotic and alien to them as the natives of Africa were to their distant colonial rulers. — Orlando Figes

There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon. — Hubert Selby Jr.

What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces. — Michel De Certeau

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Numenor and the flight of Elendil. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Dharma companions filling mountains, a sangha forms of itself: chanting, sitting ch'an stillness. Looking out from distant city walls, people see only white clouds. — David Hinton

As the lights fade to a distant glow, I look back toward the city and imagine, somewhere in all of those lives, a little girl who is a lot like me. Maybe she rides in a car thinking about someone living far away from these lights and people. Even though our lives are separated by so much I wonder if she imagines the world through eyes like mine. — Noriko Nakada

Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose ... of silence? — Walt Whitman

you. Devlin and I will take our chances on the run." They rode on in silence, speeding west toward Phoenix now, a massive, distant glow on the horizon, like a city on fire. — Blake Crouch

In places, the drop was just a little ripple - a fall of some five feet or so. But in others, majestic waterfalls plunged fifty feet or more before pounding onto the next stone platform. It looked like a man-made effect, for the various split streams and waterfalls eventually ran back together into the river, which flowed away from the city toward distant Elendel. — Brandon Sanderson