Quotes & Sayings About Loving A City

Godfrey and Hesper made a glorious pair to look at--but would theirs be a happy union?--Happy, I dare say--and not too happy. He who sees to our affairs will see that the "too" is not in them. There were fine elements in both, and, if indeed they loved, and now I think, from very necessity of their two hearts, they must have loved, then all would, by degrees, by slow degrees, most likely, come right with them. If they had been born again both, before they began, so to start fresh, then like two children hand in hand they might have run in through the gates into the city. But what is love, what is loss, what defilement even, what are pains, and hopes, and disappointments, what sorrow, and death, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, but means to this very end, to this waking of the soul to seek the home of our being--the life eternal? Verily we must be born from above, and be good children, or become, even to our self-loving selves, a scorn, a hissing, and an endless reproach. — George MacDonald

A lot of people say they want to leave this city to go somewhere else. Not me. I love this place for what it is. Ugly and pretty. Rough and tender. Chaotic and smooth. Loving and murderous. All of it. — Kwame Dawes

I do not know how to love God except by loving the poor. I do not know how to serve God except by serving the poor ... Here, within this great city of nine million people, we must, in this neighborhood, on this street, in this parish, regain a sense of community which is the basis for peace in the world. — Dorothy Day

Her streak of independence, which had first brought her to this unfriendly city, was in studied defiance of her smothering appetite for security. If she gave in to those loving appeals she knew she would take root in domestic soil and not look up and out again for another year. In which time, what adventures might have passed her by? — Clive Barker

O my vanity I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just a dream of power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council? Is this sensible and wise or is it hollow and self-loving? I don't even know if the Grandee is sincere. Does he know? Perhaps not even he. I am weak and he's strong, the offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to gain. The souls of the city, of the world, surely they are worth three angels? Is Allah so unbending that he will not embrace three more to save the human race? — Salman Rushdie

Nine Years Under is a sparkling debut
brimming with love and bursting with life. Booker's Baltimore is equal parts The Wire and The Cosby show. She doesn't shrink from the realities of life in an inner city funeral home, but she is also a loving witness, documenting the big hearted community that takes care of its own. Told with compassion, wit, and good old fashioned story telling, Sheri Booker gives us unforgettable characters who will make you laugh right up until they break your heart. — Tayari Jones

The first thing she did after she found out she was sick was to send me to live with my older female cousin in the city. I was in middle school at the time. For my mother, sending me away was her way of loving me. She said I was too young to be tied down to a sick mother and that I had too much to live for. Everybody has to say goodbye eventually, she told me, so you may as well start practicing. I cannot say she was right. I think that if we all have to say goodbye eventually then the best we can do is try to stay together as long as we possibly can. But it's not that one of us was right and the other was wrong. We just saw things differently. — Kyung-Sook Shin

A providence is shaping our ends; a plan is developing in our lives; a supremely wise and loving Being is making all things work together for good. In the sequel of our life's story, we shall see that there was a meaning and necessity in all the previous incidents, except those that were the result of our own folly and sin, and that even these have been made to contribute to the final result. Trust Him, child of God: He is leading you by a right way to the celestial city of habitation; and as from the terrace of eternity you review the path by which you came from the morning-land of childhood, you will confess that He has done all things well. — F.B. Meyer

Watching Jace hug Isabelle, she tried to school her features into a happy and loving expression.
"Are you all right?" Simon asked, with some concern. "Your eyes are crossing. — Cassandra Clare

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble 'came' from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American. — James Caskey

Do you think it's possible to do something so bad, even if you didn't mean to do it, that you can never come back from it? That no one can forgive you?"
Luke looked at him for a long, silent moment. Then he said, "Think of someone you love, Simon. Really love. Is there anything they could ever do that would mean you would stop loving them? — Cassandra Clare

The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should state the facts as they really occurred. — Lucian

And yet there are other days, when I'm downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar's dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: "A Stronger Loving World." To the only panel he's circled. Oscar - who never defaced a book in his life - circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeded in "saving the world." Veidt says: "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end." And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: "In — Junot Diaz

If you write anything meaningful over there, June, keep it far away from this city. They will turn a story about glue-addicted gypsy children in the Balkans into an animated musical about a tribe of pixie-sized fairy-dust-loving flamenco dancers who live happily ever after with their dancing bears. — Annie Ward

I have not stopped loving her, nor my parabatai; love does not stop when someone dies. — Cassandra Clare

San Jose is made up of the finest citizens of any city in the entire United States- peace loving, quiet, cultured people. ... God-fearing, law-observing, good citizens have been watching these murders increasing and have watched crime increase in this country and from the time this splendid young fellow [Brooke Hart] was murdered this vigilance committee had in mind carrying out what in their minds was real justice... — Harry Farrell

Carol and I have found that unless God baptizes us with fresh outpourings of love, we would leave New York City yesterday! We don't live in this crowded, ill-mannered, violent city because we like it. Whenever I meet or read about a guy who has sexually abused a little girl, I'm tempted in my flesh to throw him out a fifth-story window. This isn't an easy place for love to flourish. But Christ died for that man. What could ever change him? What could ever replace the lust and violence in his heart? He isn't likely to read the theological commentaries on my bookshelves. He desperately needs to be surprised by the power of a loving, almighty God. If the Spirit is not keeping my heart in line with my doctrine, something crucial is missing. I can affirm the existence of Jesus Christ all I want, but in order to be effective, he must come alive in my life in a way that even the pedophile, the prostitute, and the pusher can see. — Jim Cymbala

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. — George Burns

In retrospect, I came to Nagasaki for the regenerative properties. The second atomic bomb blast so many years ago, which had swept up most of the city in a plutonium cloud, had made the city radioactively peace-loving. Reversing the usual cycle that turns victim into perpetrator, the people who stepped from the rubble filled their hearts with a fervent devotion to peace in all its forms.
In my mind's eye I see them: wounded and dying, their lungs filled with ash and smoke. The ash sits there for some time, and when they exhale, miraculously, something akin to love comes out. — Daniel Clausen

Los Angeles was the most glamorous, tackiest, most elegant, seediest, most clever, dumbest, most beautiful, ugliest, forward-looking, retro-thinking, altruistic, self-absorbed, deal-savvy, politically ignorant, artistic-minded, criminal-loving, meaning-obsessed, money-grubbing, laid-back, frantic city on the planet. And any two slices of it, as different as Bel Air and Watts, were nevertheless uncannily alike in essence: rich with the same crazy hungers, hopes, and despairs. — Dean Koontz

He'd been living a lie since he arrived. He'd pretended to be a local, yet had loathed everything about Milwaukee. Now Al knew differently. He didn't want to be anything else but himself: a cheese curd-loving, festival-going, Brew Crew fan who adored the most incredible chef in the city. — Amy E. Reichert

This was the first time I had come face-to-face with the other side of fundamentalism. The fundamentalism that I saw in my neighborhood was sexist and misogynistic and small-minded, but it wasn't violent. It was giving and loving and brotherly. It was about helping the poor, and since everybody was poor, that meant everybody helping everybody. There wasn't the kind of urban meanness you find in many American cities. It was as if a farm community had been transplanted to the city. — Richard Engel

Places, like people, are complex, and loving them isn't simple. — Kate Milford

There's nothing rebellious about loving something that can't love you. You're a woman, you should have known that men in the city would split you in half searching for their fathers in between your legs. — Warsan Shire

But tonight he remembered only the warm rooms and the faces of men and women bent over their bowls of steaming soup, and the children already asleep in their beds. He felt for them all a profound love, and he glowed. The moment of his loving was in the world of time merely sixty seconds ticked out by his watch, but in another dimension it was an arc of light encircling the city and leaving not one heart within it untouched by blessedness. Then the clocks began to strike, and the light of the ugly little man's moment of self-forgetfulness was drawn back again into the deep warmth within him. And he understood nothing of what had happened to him, only that now, for a little while, for a few moments or a few days, he would be happy and feel safe. — Elizabeth Goudge

May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity, &c. Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good, and His mercies endure forever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, shew how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the; desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry, and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord His loving kindness, and His wonderful works before the sons of men. — William Bradford

I can't with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It's like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they're a drunk or a thief. I've loved the city my whole life - to me, it's like a great woman. — Woody Allen

God is still primarily concerned with his plan of salvation. He must establish his people; the gospel must be proclaimed; human beings must be reconciled to him. Yet he assures his people that serving the good of this pagan city is part of this very plan: "If it prospers, you too will prosper" (Jer 29:7). Loving and serving the city not only shows love and compassion; doing so also strengthens the hands of the people of God, who bear the message of the gospel to the world. Because the Jews in exile obeyed this command, they accrued the influence and leverage needed to eventually return to and restore their homeland. God ties, as it were, the fortunes of the people of God to the effectiveness of their urban ministry. — Timothy Keller

This is the deepest wish of my heart?"
"Sure," Magnus said.
"Your father, proud of you. You, the hero of the hour. Me, loving you. Everyone approving of you."
Alec looked over at Jace.
"Okay, what about the Jace thing?"
Magnus shrugged.
"I don't know. Thet part's just weird. — Cassandra Clare

Continuing up Rennes. Dodging little Saabs and Renaults. Loving walking here. Sun alternately streaming. Obliterating physiognomies. No longer nouns. But movement. Disappearing. Now heavily raining. Sitting out anyway. Over drain smelling of beer. Metro. Sewers. Fetid breath of Paris. Two cold coffees. Watching shadows lengthening. On la Gaite opposite. Where Colette once performing. Having walked in old boots across city. Drawing mole above lip. Rice-powdering delicious arms. Paris a drug. P saying on phone. Yes Paris a drug. A woman. And I waking this a.m. Thinking there must be some way. Of staying. Now my love's silhouette of rooftops eclipsing. Into night. Cold heinous breath. Blowing on privates. Through grille underneath. — Gail Scott

Hi You son or daughter of Prophet Adam pbuh; wishing you peace, health and happiness.
You can hope for a better hereafter, if you have contributed for a better herein. Thanking for the blessing called Pakistan is by loving thy country, thy city and the people around you. Do something for your neighbor. — Bakhtiar