Quotes & Sayings About Moving Cities

I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light. — Woody Allen

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive. — W.B.Yeats

Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people. I'm supremely confident that Bostonians will pull together, take care of each other, and move forward as one proud city. And as they do, the American people will be with them every single step of the way. — Barack Obama

Historically, things were moving in a pretty good direction until the Reagan presidency. And then it all got reversed. The Mexico City policy was instituted - the idea of wrecking the environment for this generation's profit and forgetting about our gets got firmly embedded. I'm sad to say the Clinton administration didn't turn it around and the Bush administration, well, I think they're the worst administration we've ever had, and I used to be a Republican. — Paul R. Ehrlich

One of the reasons there may be a trend toward moving out of the cities, again, it may be conscious or it may be unconscious, but it is a desire to connect more with nature. And with the natural rhythms. We [people] need that! We've been missing it. — Shakti Gawain

Interesting survey in the current Journal of Abnormal Psychology: New York
City has a higher percentage of people you shouldn't make any sudden moves
around than any other city in the world. — David Letterman

Maybe it'll move around, who knows?-So it can minister to different parts of the World! If it can float down from Outer Space from God out of Heaven to the Earth, then it probably can still float around the Earth and hover here or there or set down here or there. After all, it's only 1500 miles square and 1500 miles high!-With God, a city like that can just float around! — David Berg

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. — Mohsin Hamid

I'm a small-town guy, and moving to a huge city might be an adjustment. — Adam Dunn

I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring. — Lauren DeStefano

Moving cities are a fairly hoary old sci-fi trope - I seem to recall they were always cropping up on 'Doctor Who' when I was young, though I may be misremembering. — Philip Reeve

I went to Mexico City to visit, and I fell in love with the city. I went to my house to pick up my stuff. It was the craziest, most impulsive move I've ever done. I just felt like I had to stay there. — Julieta Venegas

Any time there's a major change, whether it's going into a relationship, getting out of a relationship, moving to a new city, a death - that usually provides a catalyst for an explosion of creativity. — Lucinda Williams

The world is a glorious bounty. There is more food than can be eaten if we would limit our numbers to those who can be cherished, there are more beautiful girls than can be dreamed of, more children than we can love, more laughter than can be endured, more wisdom than can be absorbed. Canvas and pigments lie in wait, stone, wood, and metal are ready for sculpture, random noise is latent for symphonies, sites are gravid for cities, institutions lie in the wings ready to solve our most intractable problems, parables of moving power remain unformulated and yet, the world is finally unknowable. — Ian L. McHarg

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors. — Ivan Chtcheglov

Other people you know seem to change quite easily. They have no problem at all with succeeding at their careers and buying apartments and moving to other cities and falling in love and getting married and hyphenating their names and adopting rescue cats and, finally, having children, and then documenting all of this meticulously on the internet. Really, it appears to be effortless on their part. Their lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes. — Jami Attenberg

I grew up in Florida in different cities. I was born in Mississippi. My parents moved a lot, so I moved to Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, all through the South. But my family's roots were from central Florida, like Daytona Beach area, so we ended up moving there. — Diplo

When human men hold an object that makes a powerful noise, or has moving parts, or spins around fast, or has a button they can push (which either screws or nails something) they become Gods in their own heads.
They can do anything: they can eat through walls and bring buildings together to form mighty empires.
They can build floating cities and flying tin cans.
But they still can't make their own beds. — Craig Stone

I miss Seattle a lot. It was my first city that I lived in on my own. It was a great city to play for. It was unfortunate for the fans what happened, but it's time to move on. I'm sure they've moved on. But in the back of my mind, I still have a thing for Seattle and always am going to remember what they've done for me. — Kevin Durant

There are areas using what's called the "checkerboard strategy." They are different cities where you can move around the "checkerboard," doing things you can't do in every square, that you can do in some of them, building a mosaic of these kinds of practices. There are about 400 cable television networks, for example, that are publicly owned. That's a big fight for big private companies. In some areas, this is a political struggle, in some it's conventional common sense. — Gar Alperovitz

Mayors are leaders, doers. We get things done, and we are moving America's cities forward. — Michael Nutter

I'm always moving apartments or moving houses or moving cities. — Paul Wesley

In his youth, he was electrified. The stars were moving in his bloodstream. He would not have been cowed by the customs of an earthly monarch. When he loved, it was with a heat and a desperation that he carried like a sword. He loved in the way that Greeks burned cities. — Brenna Yovanoff

They have no allegiance to Atlantic City whatsoever, other than nostalgia, and that doesn't pay the bills, ... The Miss America pageant has to do what it thinks best serves its interests, and if moving out of Atlantic City does, that's what it should do. — Leonard Horn

In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values and kill innocent people. — John Ashcroft

So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky. — Nelson Algren

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights) — David Levien

I'd never really experienced the West before moving to Colorado. The East Coast, where I grew up, has a lot of big cities, like Boston and New York, and is more densely populated, and I instantly fell in love with the big open spaces of the West, where you can see not just for a few miles but for a few hundred miles. — Tyler Hamilton

Rumors of dead cities, usually loaded with riches, had been heard by Dirshan when he lived in the villages. He dismissed them; men will always talk wildly of things they have not seen. Still, he thought as he looked at the slow-moving current, one never knew. There were more things locked in the past than legends, and the dead were not always as still as the grave would imply."

reply | edit | delete | flag * — Gene Lancour

As industries migrate toward the Far East, the future of many Western cities will no longer lie in manufacturing products but ideas and patents. Young, mobile elites can choose where they want to live, and they can easily move, which means that cities are involved in a heated competition for the best people. Only the most attractive cities can benefit from this development. — Charles Landry

Freed slaves were not given land, however, and formed a new urban underclass, often moving to the favelas, slum areas that are still part of Brazilian cities today. — Anonymous

His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed. — Alexander Jablokov

There's only one thing for Chicago to do, and that's to move to a better neighborhood. — Herman Fetzer

I love this city. If I am elected, I'll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody's so friendly. — Robert Kennedy

Cold has a thousand ways of moving in the world: on the sea it gallops like a troop of horses, on the countryside it falls like a swarm of locusts, in the cities like a knife-blade it slashes the streets and penetrates the chinks of unheated houses. — Italo Calvino

Some remain great cities, but they shouldn't stand still. They should move in the direction of a knowledge-oriented society. Most cities have to do something to draw attention to themselves and make their particular assets visible on the international radar. I'm not talking about developing countries, but about the United States and Europe. — Charles Landry

The soul of the river had entered my soul, And the gathered power of my soul was moving So swiftly, it seemed to be at rest Under cities of cloud and under Spheres of silver and changing worlds Until I saw a flash of trumpets Above the battlements over Time! — Edgar Lee Masters

You're the reason why I'll move to the city; you're why I'll need to leave. — Sharon Van Etten

A lot of kids are moving to Baltimore, because we have a great music scene and we've got edge. Come on down, we've got scary edge. But great edge - it's still a city you can be a bohemian in. — John Waters

Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. They used to draw crowds. Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, even though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today. A New York Times account of community resistance to the eviction of three Bronx families in February 1932 observed, "Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000."1 Sometimes neighbors confronted the marshals directly, sitting on the evicted family's furniture to prevent its removal or moving the family back in despite the judge's orders. The marshals themselves were ambivalent about carrying out evictions. It wasn't why they carried a badge and a gun. — Matthew Desmond

Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass. — George Selden

Moving to New York made all the difference in my creating this new series with Ellie Hatcher. I love Portland, and it's always going to be one of my favorite cities, but it was getting to the point where, after I'd moved to New York, I couldn't write as specifically about Portland any more. — Alafair Burke

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa ... Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both. — Harold Bloom

I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples. — Elif Shafak

Cities that tend of have better schools for middle-income families, they tend to have much better prospects for kids moving up in the income distribution. — Raj Chetty

It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area. — Richard Rodriguez

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him. — Eric Weiner

When a city is inundated with water, the water will move in all of the streets. Every pathway that has been made will be used. It doesn't matter the reason of its making. — John De Ruiter

The hipster narrative about gentrification isn't necessarily inaccurate - young people are indeed moving to cities and opening craft breweries and wearing tight clothing - but it is misleading in its myopia. Someone who learned about gentrification solely through newspaper articles might come away believing that gentrification is just the culmination of several hundred thousand people's individual wills to open coffee shops and cute boutiques, grow mustaches and buy records. But those are the signs of gentrification, not its causes. As — Peter Moskowitz

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio.
That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct.
Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

There is a world outside the one we know," he said softly, "with cultures and races and armies who have never heard of us. Yes, and cities greater than Yenking and Karakorum. To survive, to grow, we must remain strong. We must conquer new lands, so that our army is always fed, always moving. To stop is to die, Chagatai. — Conn Iggulden

Each of us must work to become a hardheaded realist, or else we risk wasting our time and energy on pursuing impossible dreams. Yet constant naysayers pursue no less impossible dreams. Their fear and cynicism move nothing forward. They kill progress. How many cynics built empires, great cities, or powerful corporations? — Colin Powell

All around us, Karachi kept moving — Kamila Shamsie

The US has developed two coordinate governing classes: the one, called 'business,' building cities, manufacturing and distributing goods, and holding complete and autocratic power over the livelihood of millions; the other, called 'government,' concerned with preaching and exemplification of spiritual ideals, so caught in a mass of theory, that when it wished to move in a practical world it had to do so by means of a sub rosa political machine. — Thurman Arnold

She was silent; the great wings almost stopped moving; only a delicate stirring seemed to keep them aloft. "Listen, then," Mrs. Whatsit said. The resonant voice rose and the words seemed to be all around them so that Meg felt that she could almost reach out and touch them:
"Sing unto the Lord a new song, and His praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that there is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof. Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice; let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory unto the Lord! — Madeleine L'Engle

I grew up in Baltimore which is a one of the biggest drug cities. I've seen a lot of drugs ... so it was always around me, but I never really indulged in those type of activities. I never used drugs in my life and I was blessed enough with the wisdom and the strength to move forward. — Mario

I'm a fifth generation Washingtonian and I was born and raised here. My kid's a sixth generation Washingtonian. Honestly I wish people didn't move because I love the people of the city. — Ian MacKaye

I think ultimately, bringing more nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl and things like that. If the cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there more rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn't be touched. — Stone Gossard

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity
say, while waiting to be called to eat
becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.
The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet. — Jane Jacobs

Frost grows on the window glass, forming whorl patterns of lovely translucent geometry.
Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition.
Now it can build castles and cities and whole ice continents with your breath's vapor.
In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in ...
But first, you hear the crackle of their wings. — Vera Nazarian

Then there was Heru. I had never spoken to him, but we smiled across the table at each other during mealtimes. He was from one of those cities so far from mine that they seemed like a figment of my imagination, where there was snow and where men rode those enormous gray birds and the women could speak with those birds without moving their mouths. — Nnedi Okorafor

There are reports that President Obama and his family may move to New York City after his term is over. Unfortunately, the city is so expensive, he's looking for another ex-president to be roommates with. — Jimmy Fallon

Keller had a professor in college who said that civilization was a matter of plumbing. That basically, the infrastructure for moving clean water in and filthy water out is what allowed people to congregate in large populations in permanent dwellings and create cities and cultures. Otherwise, people had to be nomads to literally escape their own shit. — Don Winslow

To feel safe, you need to control what the people around you are going to say and do. This is not achieved by going after the root causes of violence. This is not even achieved by working to slowly improve social conditions. It is achieved through silence and disappearance, by moving the offending object or person out of sight. . . . [However] [d]o we want to live in a world that is safe? Do we want to push the homeless out of our cities and call that a victory over poverty? . . . Or do we want to do the very hard work of recognizing and addressing the actual causes of harm to women? Safety is a short-term goal and it is unsustainable. Eventually, the unaddressed causes will find new ways of manifesting themselves as problems. Pull up the dandelions all you want, but unless you dig up that whole goddamn root it's just going to keep showing back up. — Jessa Crispin

You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living. — Ray Bradbury

It was announced that President Obama and his wife, when they're finished in Washington, are moving to New York City. The guy just can't get enough gridlock. — David Letterman

We're moving cities, we're changing our name just like this hotel. You call that all right?"
"Yes," she said. "We still have each other. We still have our lives."
"How the definition of being all right changes," said Alexander. — Paullina Simons