Quotes & Sayings About Skyscrapers

We all shared a feeling of hunger, empty bellies, bottomless appetites that when filled, kept us up at night. When we spoke we shouted, all our voices together, a chorus of pleas, and rooftop dreams, voices carrying from building to building, no skyscrapers to block them, we all shared a voice, devouring the ears that accepted it, that opened to us. We would be heard. We would dizzily take in those sunrise nights and talk about what it would be like to be heard. — Roof Alexander

It's insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. But sanity — Charles Stross

These letters are all I have left.
26 friends to tell my stories to.
26 letters are all I need. I can stitch them together to create oceans and ecosystems. I can fit them together to form planets and solar systems. I can use letters to construct skyscrapers and metropolitan cities populated by people, places, things, and ideas that are more real to me than these 4 walls.
I need nothing but letters to live. Without them I would not exist.
Because these words I write down are the only proof I have that I'm still alive. — Tahereh Mafi

As her body expanded so did her interior landscape. She imagined minarets, skyscrapers, entire cities being constructed inside her. Thighs thickened, belly became basketball-sized, buttocks deepened with dimples. Even her taste-buds shifted, and she held her tongue out for crushed ice, chalk, charcoal. — Diriye Osman

A mirror can trick you day by day into thinking you remain looking and existing in one way forever. But a photograph presents you with the truth: it freezes you eternally, existing as a reminder that you can never, ever go back to any one moment again- that you are always changing, hour by hour, cell by cell, in tiny fragments that build skyscrapers overnight. — Kels Adeline Sapp

Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields. — Michio Kaku

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings. — Gregory Maguire

It is sound statesmanship to add two battleships every time our neighbour adds one and two stories to our skyscrapers every time he piles a new one on top of his to threaten our light. There is no limit to this soundness but the sky. — Mark Twain

Afraid

We cry among the skyscrapers
As our ancestors
Cried among the palms in Africa
Because we are alone,
It is night,
And we're afraid. — Langston Hughes

So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child.
And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child.
"It must be a free child," they said to each other.
"It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."
So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. — Carl Sandburg

We wanted to blast the world free of history.... picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night. — Chuck Palahniuk

Wall Street has come to America's heartland, really. The only thing missing are the skyscrapers, you know? — Dennis Quaid

[New York] is a city largely based on great skyscrapers, and they will always be the essence of New York. That won't change, just as the character of the people who live here will not be altered by this tragedy. — Donald Trump

After twenty annual visits, I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers. — Cecil Beaton

Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people. All we do is use words to talk about things like the cosmos, the origin of the universe, evolution, the origin of life. What's there to be frightened of? It's just an opinion. — Richard Dawkins

Some of the names I could not reason, like the box marked DARKNESS, or the one with DEATH OF THE FIRSTBORN written in pencil on its front. I noticed that there was a box on the top of one of these skyscrapers of boxes that was marked DUST — Jonathan Safran Foer

Nick Yablon ranges widely, from log cabins to skyscrapers and from Tocqueville to pulp fiction. He combines imaginative research with probing interpretation. Untimely Ruins offers fresh and challenging insights about the American built environment on nearly every page. — T. J. Jackson Lears

Therefore, the very large department store should not be viewed as a sinful undertaking, as, for example, the Tower of Babel. It is, rather, proof of the inability of the human race of today to be extravagant. It even builds skyscrapers: and the consequence this time isn't a great flood, but just a shop ... — Joseph Roth

And just as your beautiful skyscrapers were destroyed and caused your grief, beautiful buildings and precious homes crumbled over their owners in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq by American weapons ... Americans should feel the pain they have inflicted on other peoples of the world, so as when they suffer, they will find the right solution and the right path. — Saddam Hussein

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel. — Michael Montoure

I'm a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world's hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan's work for sure - he's the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I'm still walking around New York like a tourist staring up at all the skyscrapers. I wave at people, I shake hands, I help ladies with strollers. — Jack McBrayer

Hitler wanted to hear all about the American skyscrapers ... but failed utterly to draw logical conclusions from the information ... He was passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own. — Ernst Hanfstaengl

His [the pedestrian's] elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts his at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. — Michel De Certeau

Centralization of society's vital services in giant computer centers, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, air- traffic control centers, 100-story skyscrapers, and government compounds increases its vulnerability ... choosing his targets, today's saboteur could pollute a city's water supply, dynamite power transmission towers, cripple an airport control center, destroy a corporate or government computer center. — Anatol Rapoport

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen
all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it. Here it was everywhere
on the floors, up the walls , on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza. — Bill Bryson

He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. — Ayn Rand

Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb. — Andre Malraux

She stood in quiet excitement when the boat sailed back and she saw the city growing again to meet her. She stretched her arms wide. The city expanded, to her elbows, to her wrists, beyond her fingertips. Then the skyscrapers rose over her head, and she was back ...
Dominique. — Ayn Rand

Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. — George W. S. Trow

In the distance Richard could see the skyscrapers of Los Angeles rising out of the ocean; barnacle crusted concrete and steel emerging from crashing waves. Once a symbol of economic might, they were now a macabre monument to the mortality of man. — Alexander Ferrick

Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil ... a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons ... never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error ... Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability. — Fulton J. Sheen

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums. — Li Keqiang

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all. — Geoffrey S. Fletcher

If so, there are - again - two possible attitudes to take. We can say that these twelve were great benefactors, that we are all fed by the overflow of the magnificent wealth of their spirit, and that we are glad to accept it in gratitude and brotherhood. Or, we can say that by the splendor of their achievement which we can neither equal nor keep, these twelve have shown us what we are, that we do not want the free gifts of their grandeur, that a cave by an oozing swamp and a fire of sticks rubbed together are preferable to skyscrapers and neon lights - if the cave and the sticks are the limit of our own creative capacities. Of the two attitudes, Dominique, which would you call the truly humanitarian one? Because, you see, I'm a humanitarian. — Ayn Rand

She smiled, tilted her head, and ... have you ever seen video of melting glaciers where huge chunks, the size of skyscrapers, break off and crash into the sea? If hearts could do that, then when her hair slid from behind her ear and down her eyes, and the right side of her lip turned up, I heard my heart crack down the middle. — Charles Martin

It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the "developed" and the latter as the "developing" world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of "development" are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of "development"? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more "developed" than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter? — Vinoth Ramachandra

I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture - $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out. — Michael Winter

There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. — Federico Garcia Lorca

New York in November really does have a special charm to it. The air is clear and crisp, and the leaves on the trees in Central Park are just beginning to turn golden. The sky is so clear you can see forever, and the skyscrapers lavishly reflect the sun's rays. You feel you can keep on walking one block after another without end. Expensive cashmere coats fill the windows at Bergdorf Goodman, and the streets are filled with the delicious smell of roasted pretzels. — Haruki Murakami

I find it a privilege and an honor to be human, for to me, one of the most wondrous and beautiful things in the universe, is found in human form.
Because to be human, is to be able to dream dreams of pyramids and skyscrapers, and majestic works of art that spring from the human mind. — Sara Niles

As the avenues and streets of a city are nothing less than its arteries and veins, we may well ask what doctor would venture to promise bodily health if he knew that the blood circulation was steadily growing more congested! — Hugh Ferriss

America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living - including the inhabitants of the slums. — Ayn Rand

It's like being on a tightrope stretched tightly between two skyscrapers - the past and the future. — Donna Cooner

The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s. — Jared Diamond

I built and I built - heaven knows I have done that well. Those skyscrapers, full of tenants, floor after floor, and not a single room containing you. You asked why I came here to Rome. I never cared about the news. I came to be in the same room as you, even if I had to build that room, fill it with people, with typewriters, the rest. I only hope you understand that the paper was for you. — Tom Rachman

Spider-Man is a genuine American myth with a dark, primal power ... but it's also got this great superhero, and - hey! - he can fly through the theater at 40 miles an hour. It's got villains, it's got skyscrapers, it's colorful, it's Manhattan. I knew it would be a challenge, but I saw the inherent theatricality in it, and I couldn't resist. — Julie Taymor

[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors! — Tom Wolfe

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. — Marcus Sakey

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse. — W. H. Auden

Nothing has the power to remind you how alone you are like walking through a conglomeration of empty skyscrapers. — Matthew Tysz

On the street below, the weather is calm. But up here, high winds threaten to topple the workers. A sudden gust can knock them from their footing with its sheer force or send a fatal vibration through the beams on which they stand. And yet the men joke, laugh, stroll across the foot-wide beams as though they are on solid ground. To the people on the sidewalk, tiny as ants below, the skywalkers appear entirely unafraid. A hundred years ago, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers built the skyscrapers and bridges that surround them. — David Weitzman

I just need green. I need to wake up and see grass and squirrels. I don't want to see skyscrapers. — Andre Leon Talley

The creatures of human myth flourish in Ourea. Trees are this world's skyscrapers. Magic its currency. And while the rest of Earth forgot what it means to dream big, Ourea kept alive its wonder. — S.M. Boyce

Intense sunlight rained down on a half-submerged city. Waves crashed between buildings that stood like waterlogged tombstones. Skyscrapers of smashed glass and twisted rusting metal jutted from the churning swell as islands of broken dreams. A familiar tower with a familiar clock face ... Big Ben. London stared back at Blue. What was left of it. A sea-drowned cemetery for a time and a place long dead. — Kev Heritage

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology. — Oriana Fallaci

Build Icebergs, Not Skyscrapers — Miles Anthony Smith

To save energy, New York City is now dimming the lights of the skyscrapers and the skyline at night. There's a bad side to this. If you need Batman, you have to text him. — David Letterman

Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It's also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower. — Norman Foster

Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval - a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old - and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers. — Bill Bryson

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

is "an architect of the modern type who preaches and practices cooperation. He has no use for the architect who 'shuts himself up in his office to make a design and then sends it out to a contractor to build or to an engineer to fit up the plumbing, heating and steel as best as he can.' Nor has he any use for the architect who 'goes up to a Communion on Mount Sinai and hands the results to the owner, the engineers and the public: In his view, as in my own, the best designs, at any rate for the building of skyscrapers, come from 'a group of minds in which the architect is one link in the — Ayn Rand

Never forget, Americans, that yours is a spiritual country. Yes, I know you're a practical people. Like others, I've marveled at your factories, your skyscrapers, and your arsenals. But underlying everything else is the fact that America began as a God-loving, God-fearing, God-worshipping people. — Carlos P. Romulo

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary. — Rem Koolhaas

The interesting thing about cities isn't what they do when people are looking," Ben says. "It's what they do when they think nobody's looking. Like, the shit the city is proud of? The shining skyscrapers downtown, the sports stadiums, the public art? You can't judge a city by that. That only tells you what the rich people are doing on a good day. It's what people do on a bad day - a bad day when there are no security cameras watching - that tells you what you really want to know. It's how people act during a blackout, a hurricane, or a siege that tells you the truth about a city. — Scott Kenemore

If you focus your eyes towards the horizon, everything and everyone walking in front of you becomes a blurry mass. That's what everyone else became. All of their dark wool suits began to mesh into one, and they began to rhythmically march in unison, all while I gazed at the sliver of sky that seemed to be pressed tightly in between the skyscrapers. I kept on walking and staring at the sky, and I began to notice the skyscrapers becoming larger and larger, and before I knew it, I had to turn to get to my building, and of course, the automat. — Cristina Martin

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert. — Bruce Crown

In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water. — Brendan Gill

Angels and demons, heaven and hell, God, morality, law and language. It's all metaphor. Scaffolding to handle the areas where base reality won't cut it for you guys, where it's too cold for humans to live without something made up. We codify our hopes and fears and wants, and then build whole societies on the code. And then forget it ever was code and treat it like fact. Act like the universe gives a shit about it. Go to war over it, string men and women up by the neck for it. Firebomb trains and skyscrapers in the name of it. — Richard Morgan

In real life, the monsters are the ones abducting and killing children or flying hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers or looting our treasury and sending our kids off to fight a bullshit war just so they can line their own pockets and the pockets of their corporate buddies or eradicating our Bill of Rights in the name of national security. Those are the real monsters. — Brian Keene

There's the downtown area of Tupelo. Did you see the skyscrapers? Two stories. — Bobby Heenan

Art deals with profound and simple moods ... Let us suppose that the artist - in this instance (the artist )Picabia - gets a certain impression by looking at our skyscrapers, our city, our way of life, and that he tries to reproduce it ... he will convey it in plastic ways on the canvas, even though we see neither skyscrapers nor city on it. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

I don't know what London's coming to - the higher the buildings the lower the morals. — Noel Coward

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless. — Henry Miller

Under the dark evening sky, the skyscrapers seemed to become gigantic natural monoliths, and all the super-sized structures that so dominated the city, that so marked Coruscant as a monument to the ingenuity of the reasoning species, seemed somehow the mark of folly, of futile pride striving against the vastness and majesty beyond the grasp of any mortal. — R.A. Salvatore

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

In 'Swimming Pool,' all the colors are very warm, sunny, the pool and all that. In 'Love Crime,' everything is so cold, and it's all inside skyscrapers. — Ludivine Sagnier

The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral. — David Mitchell

He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back. Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way. — Alice Sebold

In all these products, whether iron bridges, locomotives, automobiles, telescopes, cottages, airport-hangars, funicular railways, skyscrapers, or children's toys, the will towards a new style expresses itself. The similarity of these examples to the new creations in art consists in the same striving for clear, pure form which expresses truth in the objects. — Theo Van Doesburg

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry. — Daniel J. Boorstin

New York is vertical - all skyscrapers. — Tony Scott

The bias among architecture critics isn't against skyscrapers per se, but against the way in which their design is so heavily dictated by economic considerations - the way in which skyscrapers are real estate before they are architecture. — Paul Goldberger

This (America) is a land of rich diversity, from the towering skyscrapers of Manhatan all the way to the towering mounds of garbage piled up next to the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan. — Dave Barry

Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there
lives alongside the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred
million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! — Leon Trotsky

Me? Rebuild" I shook my head."First off, I don't know anything about construction or reconstruction. And second, have you been down there? Have you seen it? So many people haven't moved back or rebuilt, and I totally get it. Why invest all that time and money when each hurricane season brings a new threat?"
Aimee regarded me with a steady blue gaze. "Why build skyscrapers in San Francisco that might be knocked down by an earthquake? Or why build farms in Kansas and Oklahoma that might get blown away by a tornado?" She snorted, and it seemed so uncharacteristic for the elegant old woman that I almost laughed. "Where did they want us to go, anyway? I figure if we're still breathing, then we're meant to keep going. So we rebuild. We start over. It's just what we do. — Karen White

The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails. — Federico Garcia Lorca

If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street. — Joseph Rykwert

Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows — Joseph Patrick Pascale

That's what I love about Chicago ... It is the staccato aspect of the skyscrapers. But the ground is very loose, very relaxed. It makes Chicago far more pleasant than other cities. — Ben Van Berkel

I love skyscrapers. Visiting cities lush with tall buildings has always been a treat for me. The implications of these immense towers are tremendous - a representation of the power of mind over matter. It never ceases to amaze me that within our minds exist the power to transform earthly materials into these colossal giants. For me, a walk among skyscrapers is a pleasant reminder of the boundless potential of human thought. — Todd William

As Edward Glaeser put it, 'Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers. — Matt Ridley

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped. — Jonathan Safran Foer

And fit, and he carried himself with a confident poise that inspired trust and respect. He gestured at one of the two seats in front of his glass-and-chrome desk and waited until I sat to settle into his Aeron chair. Against the backdrop of sky and skyscrapers, Mark looked accomplished and powerful. — Sylvia Day

This is its ancient soul, the quiet place, away from all its beats and rhythms. And my mind is unable to comprehend the sheer expanse of it. It's as though I've suddenly blinked and found myself standing on a tightrope strung between two skyscrapers. I am paralysed by awe. The feeling you get when confronted by something infinite and inevitable and indifferent to you. — Kirsty Eagar

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. — Jonathan Lethem

We've seen those results in generations of Muslim immigrants - farmers and factory workers, helping to lay the railroads and build our cities, the Muslim innovators who helped build some of our highest skyscrapers and who helped unlock the secrets of our universe. — Barack Obama

People just don't understand how many men it takes to build one good man. Next time you're in Manhattan and you see one of those mighty skyscrapers going up, pay attention to how many men are engaged in the enterprise. It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower. — J.R. Moehringer

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard - or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers. — Gretchen Rubin