Summer And The City Quotes & Sayings

Dad and I leave town in the early dark. It's the second Sunday of the holidays, and we pack up the old blue car with enough clothes for summer and hit the road. It's so early he's wiping hills of sand piled in the corners of his eyes. I wipe a few tears from mine. Tears don't pile, though. They grip and cling and slide in salty trails that I taste until the edge of the city. — Cath Crowley

Delta's plan to upgrade JFK facilities will improve our customers' travel experience and make it more efficient and enjoyable to travel through one of the world's premier international gateways. Our customers should make no mistake that Delta is committed to New York and that this summer's expansion at JFK is an important step in offering enhanced service to customers in most every direction we serve from New York City. — Jim Whitehurst

Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade. — Stephanie Clifford

I was interning at a children's theater group in Kentucky - that was my first job out of college. I had jumped around a couple of regional theaters, and I was about to go back to Maine to work at a summer Shakespeare theater there. I didn't want to just jump around the country from gig to gig. I really wanted to go to a city and get involved in a theater scene and a theater community. — Timothy Simons

It had been a long while since I'd watched any television, and things had only gotten weirder. Beauty pageants for infants; ruddy men in trucker caps fighting over abandoned storage lockers; public shamings of compulsive hoarders and pre-diabetics; affluent suburban women made up like transvestite hookers, competing with each other in feats of coarseness and cruelty; barely literate pregnant teens with tattoos, unfocused eyes, and futures like wrecked cars; apoplectic crypto-fascists spitting bile and paranoia; a carnival midway of weight loss devices, hair growth creams, erectile dysfunction potions, and pottery from which herbs grew like green hair. It was like the day room of a surrealist mental hospital, or any big city ER on a summer Saturday night. — Peter Spiegelman

I've officially turned into a loser," she whispered cynically. "I'm looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I've had my 'going out and having fun' quota for the year, I guess, and it's June. — Daniel Amory

Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me? — C.S. Lewis

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be. — Oscar Wilde

Don't you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world? asked Connor irrelevantly. — Daniel Amory

This is so funny," said Ellen, noticing the seating arrangement. "Isn't this funny? Tom, come sit next to Robin. Griffin, sit next to Laura."
I stood up and sat next to Robin while Griffin brought his chair over to Laura.
"That's better," said Ellen. "Isn't that better? — Daniel Amory

Let your rest be perfect in its season, like the rest of waters that are still. If you will have a model or your living, take neither the stars, for they fly without ceasing, nor the ocean that ebbs and flows, nor the river that cannot stay, but rather let your life be like that of the summer air, which has times of noble energy and times of perfect peace. It fills the sails of ships upon the sea, and the miller thanks it on the breezy uplands; it works generously for the health and wealth of all men, yet it claims it hours of rest.. I have pushed the fleet, I have turned the mill, I have refreshed the city, and now though the captain may walk impatiently on the quarter-deck, and the miller swear, and the city stink, I will stir no more until it pleases me. — Philip Gilbert Hamerton

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses ... — Irwin Shaw

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

'Privileged,' without a doubt, was one of the best work experiences of my life. Every crew member cried when we got canceled. But I was then given the opportunity to be in New York and on 'Gossip Girl' and spend the summer in a city that I've absolutely fallen in love with. — Joanna Garcia

A woman calls from Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She's sure of it. Now she's only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all heir luggage, and their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof.
Bermuda triangulated. — Chuck Palahniuk

In 1992, as we sought to establish our permanent terrestrial campus, we put out an RFP (request for proposals) that basically said, "Hi there, we're ISU. We have this concept for a permanent campus. We've held five summer programs in five different cities, and this is our vision for what we want to create and where we want to go. Please tell us how much cash endowment, buildings, and operational money you will give us to bring our vision to your city." Had we gotten no response at all, I would not have been surprised. But that wasn't the case. Within six months, we received seven proposals ranging from $20 million to $50 million in funding, buildings, faculty, equipment, and even the promise of accreditation. In short, everything we needed to implement the next phase of ISU. — Peter H. Diamandis

People who keep a large snake in their apartment building, which happens quite a bit, all of a sudden, within two summers, have a 14-foot animal that's eating adult rabbits, and needs quite a bit of room and quite a bit of heat. That's the animal that gets put in the back of a pick-up truck and dumped into the Florida Everglades or the city lake, or just left on a doorstep - again, it's quite often the animal that suffers. — Henry Rollins

Don't you think it's weird when someone has photographs of themselves all over the place? It's like they're trying to prove they exist. — Candace Bushnell

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer. — Edward Hoagland

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women. — Tim Winton

Fortunately the City is vigilant. It too has its secret weapons. Since the summer it has released safety valves that form part of a wonderful mechanism, known only to itself. For the past three months we've noticed the most heartening appearance all over the place of eccentrics, more or less raving lunatics, cranks, and reinvigorating crackpots. — Jacques Yonnet

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture - its only value to provide shade for the livestock - but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor - especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer's day - could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic. — Graham Swift

By the time we had passed St Clement Dane's, the pavements had grown less crowded, and as we drew by the Temple, thick woolly clouds of vapour were curling up from the steep lanes leading down to the river on our right and were beginning to suffuse the light from the gas-lamps and to deepen the gloom of the quieter streets of that quarter. Past St Paul's, on through the sepulchral City and up beyond Bishopsgate, the breeze had dropped and the haze grew thicker and heavier. By the time we had arrived at our rendezvous with Lestrade in a warren of dismal backstreets in Spitalfields, we were mired in the drab wraiths of a summer fog. — Seamus Duffy

Babies! That's all it's about. Who ever knew the world would be all about babies?" Samantha shouts.
"Every time I see a baby, I swear, I want to throw up," Miranda says.
"I did throw up once." I nod eagerly. "I saw a filthy bib, and that was it."
"Why don't these people just get cats and a litter box?" Samantha asks. — Candace Bushnell

How to unravel the knot of reality? Slowly and patiently. You cannot run away from it. You cannot run towards it. Yet truth runs in your footsteps. It is the face in the mirror, the light of the sun, the winter rainstorms, the heat of summer in the city — Frederick Lenz

I went to the beach a couple of times in New York City. Tough summer out there, but I was pretty excited. I found what I thought at the time was a very rare seashell. And I took it to a friend of mine who works in a museum. And I was really disappointed. It turned out to be just a human ear. — David Letterman

In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. — Barack Obama

It struck Sophie that Comic-Con was something like a modern-day Brigadoon, a thriving city of a hundred and fifty thousand people that sprang up here in San Diego for less than a week every summer. People flocked to it from across the nation and around the world to populate it for its all-too-short existence, played their chosen roles, then dispersed back to their real homes as soon as the city disappeared. And the next summer, they'd do it all over again, forming a living history of their own in annual installments. — Matt Forbeck

With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city's many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air! — Suzanne Rindell

My share. I hate owing anyone anything. Don't you? — Candace Bushnell

Why do magazines do this to women?" Miranda complains now, glaring at Vogue. "It's all about creating insecurity. Trying to make women feel like they're not good enough. And when women don't feel like they're good enough, guess what?"
"What?" I ask, picking up the grocery bag.
"Men win. That's how they keep us down," she concludes.
"Except the problem with women's magazines is that they're written by women," I point out.
"That only shows you how deep this thing goes. Men have made women coconspirators in their own oppression. I mean, if you spend all your time worrying about leg hair, how can you possibly have time to take over the world? — Candace Bushnell

Most people who spend their lives are dreaming of having a summer house somewhere in the suburb of their city where they could lie in the hot sun all day long, drinking coffee and juice. They think they are enjoying life, but really they are spending life. — Sunday Adelaja

In this neighborhood of unreliable cars and steady, hopeful hearts. In this city known for its winters, in the middle of the plains, in the heart of the country. In this gentle summer soon to slip into the crisp cool of fall. Here in some kind of broken down glory, they had taken root, and thrived. Mostly. — Caitlin Hamilton Summie

The light of an early Summer afternoon as it slips toward dusk has so many good things wrapped up in it.. — Brandi L. Bates

Sex. It's the biggest sham of all. I mean, your whole life, all you ever hear is how you're supposed to save yourself for marriage. And how it's so special. And then you finally do it. And you're like, that's it? This is what everyone's been raving about? — Candace Bushnell

For city dwellers like me who don't get to vacation in the summer, no filmmaker can so effectively make you feel like you went to France for August, fell in love, got hurt, broke up, grew up, and figured some things out - all in 90 minutes or so. My favorite of Rohmer's cinematic escapes is 'La Collectionneuse.' — Jake Paltrow

Blitz to V-E Day. After the war was over, the novelist John Hersey invented a new kind of journalism, modelled on the techniques of fiction, in his report about the atomic-bomb attack on Hiroshima, which filled an entire issue of the magazine in the summer of 1946. That June, Ross wrote to Flanner, with a touch of rue, "Probably the magazine will never get back to where it was." The war took The New Yorker out of the city and into the world. — Anonymous

I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school. — Margaret Atwood

I want so badly to help you realize, Elizabeth Anne, how difficult and puzzling and full of wonder it all is: some day I will tell you how I learned to watch the shifting light of autumn days or smelled the earth through snow in March; how one winter morning God vanished from my life and how one summer evening I sat in a Ferris wheel, looking down on a man that hurt me badly; I will tell you how I once travelled to Rome and saw all the soldiers in that city of dead poets; I will tell you how I met your father outside a movie house in Toronto, and how you came to be. Perhaps that is where I will begin. On a winter afternoon when we turn the lights on early, or perhaps a summer day of leaves and sky, I will begin by conjugating the elemental verb. I am. You are. It is. — Richard B. Wright

Emma, you and your poetry, me and my acting--what are we trying to do? We can't top this city. We poor would-be artists can't compete with or improve on the rich density of human experience on any random, average, slow summer night in New York--who are we trying to kid? In the overheard conversation in the elevator, in the five minutes of talk the panhandler gives you before hitting you for the handout, in the brief give-and-take when you are going out and the cleaning lady is coming in--there are the real stories, incredible, heartbreaking and ridiculous, there are the command performances, the Great American Novels but forever unwritten, untoppable, and so beautifully unaware. — Wilton Barnhardt

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. — Sheila Weller

Born of antimodern sentiment, the summer camp was ultimately a modern phenomenon, a "therapeutic space" as much dependent on the city, the factory, and "progress" to define its parameters as on that intangible but much lauded entity called nature. In short, the summer camp should best be read not as a simple rejection of modern life, but, rather, as one of the complex negotiations of modernity taking place in mid-twentieth century Canada. — Sharon Wall

A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England. — Rudyard Kipling

Look, girls know when they're cute," he said. "You don't have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn't have a job. I was like, 'How are you going to get a job there in this market?' And she's like, 'I'll wink and I'll smile.' She's a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen. — Daniel Amory

Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods. — Edna Ferber

For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases, load our kids into the car, and drive from tense, crowded New York City to my family's cottage in Maine. It's on an island, with stretches of sea and sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and pine trees. We barbecue, swim, lie around, and try to do nothing. — Hope Davis

I can't wait for summer in the city! I love all the free activities in the parks that become available to us New Yorkers. Yoga and movie screenings in Bryant Park, concerts in Central Park - there's so much more available to the New York community in the summer! And everyone just seems to smile more. — Kara Lindsay

You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise is so thick your scary thoughts can't get a word in edgewise. But here in the county, there is only space. On the stone bridge by the stream. On the mossy rock at the edge of the yard. Behind the abandoned trailer where Art, the old man with the glass eye, used to live. Space, space, space, and you can scare yourself into thinking your thoughts are more like voices. — Lena Dunham

What?" She gasps. "Who did you do it with? You can't go out there and pick up some random stranger. Oh no, Carrie. You didn't. You didn't pick up some guy at a bar. — Candace Bushnell

I'm telling you right now that I'm not going to give up on you. I want you to be mine, City, and before the summer is over, you will be. I've never wanted someone the way I want you. — K.A. Robinson

There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm - the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp "all aboard!" and a bell ringing. Confusedly Maury saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck, carolling hoarsely at the summer morning. CHAPTER — F Scott Fitzgerald

The proudest city in all the world was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day, the Lands of the Long Summer scorched and drowned and blighted. — George R R Martin

I think people get excited about summer wardrobes and what they will wear on holiday, and people have an opportunity to wear things that they don't normally wear when they're in the city. — Jade Jagger

The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity. — Emile Zola

Inside each man, though he did not know it, nor ever considered it, was the image of the woman he someday must love. Whether she was composed of all the music he had ever heard or all the trees he had ever seen or all the friends of his childhood, certainly no one could tell. Whether the eyes were his mother's, and the chin that of a girl cousin swimming in a summer lake twenty-five years ago, this was unknowable also. But most men carried this image, like a locket, like a pearl-cameo, in their head a lifetime, taking it out only rarely, taking it never, after marriage, afraid then to compare it to the reality. And most men never saw the woman they would love anywhere, in the dark theatre, in a book, or passing on the street. They saw her only after midnight when the city was asleep and the pillow was cool under their heads. And she was a composite of all dreams and all women and every moonlit night since the calendar began. — Ray Bradbury

Summer mornings, the light of the world pouring in and the silence. It was a barefoot life, the cool of the night on the floorboards, the green trees if you stepped outside, the first faint cries of the birds. He arrived in a suit and didn't put it on again until he went back to the city. — James Salter

We hate guys who date more than one woman at a time. I've always believed that what's unacceptable in one sex should, by definition, be unacceptable in the other. — Candace Bushnell

In conformity with these designs on the city of Washington, and notwithstanding the disastrous results of the invasion of 1862, it was determined by the Rebel government last summer to resume the offensive in that direction. — Edward Everett

The first professional training I received of any kind was when I was 14 years old and we were in Kansas City, Missouri. I attended the Kansas City Art Institute for one summer. — Marc Davis

New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it's not, it's like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they're one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again. — Peter Cameron

Summer sticks to her skirt sumptuously, in the shiny gray fabric hanging loosely from her curves. Her chestnut eyes, apparently hidden from strangers; her simple but graceful face, unpainted by Madison Avenue; and her straight black hair, parted down the middle without ego, all suggest a minimalist - almost pastoral - beauty that is oddly discordant with her fashionable attire, comfortable indifference to the crowds, and quasi-attentive perusal of the Time magazine unfolded over her hand. — Zack Love

Summer in Karachi is brutal. The heat alone is ugly and unforgiving. Add unrelenting humidity, and the elements become merciless. The city sits on the sea but is surrounded by desert land that has been known to reach some of the hottest temperatures anywhere. When the heat reaches its peak, you feel baked in an oven and the thick, humid air gives everything an extra, hot skin. It's an effort to even lift your finger. You could get by with air-conditioning, but in this teeming, overpopulated Third World megapolis, it is a luxury few can afford. — Saad Shafqat

After the riot in Chicago that Summer, I was greatly discouraged. But we had trained a group of about two thousand disciplined devotees of nonviolence who were willing to take blows without retaliation. We started out engaging in constitutional privileges, marching before real estate offices in all-white communities. And that nonviolent , disciplined, determined force created such a crisis in the city of Chicago that the city had to do something to change conditions. We didn't have any Molotov cocktails, we didn't have any bricks, we didn't have guns, we just had the power of our bodies and our souls. There was power there, and it was demonstrated once more. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure. — Roman Payne

That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightening echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven ... Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by the lightning now bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. — Shirley Jackson

I'm a realist. Just because you had sex once doesn't mean you have to fall in love. — Candace Bushnell

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful. — Sherwood Anderson

The summer sun continued to rise in the sky and propel shocks of heat down on the city and the heavy moisture moistened bodies and clothing, and people fanned and wiped at sweating faces trying to survive another bitch of a day as Harry and Marion peacefully passed the day sleeping in each others arms oblivious to the reality surrounding them. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house. I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes - a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker - varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it alone the Say. Sticklebacks in jars,. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? — David Mitchell

Miss Ellis?" Mrs. Perterson says. "It's your turn. Introduce Alex to the class"
"This is Alejandro Fuentes. When he wasn't hanging out on street corners and harrassing innocent people this summer, he toured the inside of jails around the city, if you know what i mean. His secret desire is to go to college and become a chemistry teacher, like you Mrs. Peterson."
Brittney flashed me a triumpnet smile, thinking she won this round. Guess again, gringa. "This is Brittney Ellis," I say, all eyes focused on me. "This summer she went to the mall, bought new clothes to extend her wardrobe, and spent her daddy's money on plastic surgery to enhance her, ahem, assets. Her secret desire is to date a Mexicano before she graduates."
Game on ... — Simone Elkeles

Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour. — Evelyn Waugh

If a man doesn't ask you to marry him
or at least live with him
after two years, he never will. It means he's only interested in having a good time. — Candace Bushnell

Lots of famous people are late bloomers. My father says it's an advantage to be a late bloomer. Because when good things start happening, you're ready for it. — Candace Bushnell

As the Little House settled down on her new foundation, she smiled happily. Once again she could watch the sun and moon and stars. Once again she could watch Spring and Summer and Fall and Winter come and go. Once again she was lived in and taken care of. Never again would she be curious about the city ... Never again would she want to live there ... The stars twinkled above her ... A new moon was coming up ... It was Spring ... And all was quiet and peaceful in the country. — Virginia Lee Burton

Only the "intercourse' part." Miranda makes quotation marks with her fingers. "Why do they call it intercourse anyway? It makes it sound like it's some kind of conversation. Which it isn't. It's penetration, pure and simple. There's no give-and-take involved."
"It's an act of war," Miranda objects, getting heated.
"The penis is saying, "Let me in,' and the vagina is saying, "Get the hell away from me, creep. — Candace Bushnell

When they were all ready, Halpern again counted them in, and the lyrical clarinet line floated over the strings and, Max felt, out of the open window and on, out and out over the hot, dusty July city like summer rain. — Lucy Beckett

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. — F Scott Fitzgerald

And that summer, as Hurricane Ella made its way toward the city, an emergency crew worked at night under veil of secrecy to weld two-inch-thick steel plates around the two hundred critical bolts, and the building was secured. The Citicorp tower has stood solidly ever since. The — Atul Gawande

The stars glittered in the sky and as the number of people at the party grew there were merging conversations and laughter and bodies moving in outlines around the kegs of beer in a curtsy of youth. — Daniel Amory

Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine. — Bruno Schulz

The entire city was his hunting ground. In the summer months, dressed in a blazer and wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle, he would regularly stroll along under the arches, and then along the pier. Next he would ride on the Volks Railway, where in the cramped intimacy of its hard seats he liked to talk to strangers, telling them this was the world's oldest still-running electric train, and boring them with facts about it. — Peter James

The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward. — Ben Aaronovitch

Yow. Guys can be so insecure. — Candace Bushnell

Have I become the girl who waits by the phone, hoping it will ring, who asks a friend to dial her number to make sure the phone is working? — Candace Bushnell

No, it's too much. I should never have let you know that I was here. After all, there was no reason to tell you. It was just that we landed and I was sucked up by the tentacles of this, your city, and your name and that summer that were all inseparable and I called as soon as I put my bag down on the bed in this room. — Ana Castillo

After I made it my business to find out how much money people have been squandering on these frivolous and insanely ostentatious fireworks displays we've seen in every corner of Istanbul every night this summer, I had to ask myself if the people celebrating at those weddings might not have been happier - bearing in mind that we are now a city of ten million people - if the money had been spent on educating the children of the poor. Am I right or wrong [1997]? Especially — Orhan Pamuk

On the other hand, it seemed to be working. For Samantha, anyway. And in comparison, my own relationship with Bernard was sorely lacking. Not only in sex, but in the simple fact that I still wasn't sure I was ever going to see him again. I guess the best thing about living with a guy is that you know you're going to see him again. I mean, he has to come home at some point, right? — Candace Bushnell

He's probably one of those "love the one you're with" guys
meaning he automatically goes after whatever woman happens to be around when he's feeling horny."
"Just another reason why I'll never get married," I say, getting out of the car.
"Oh, Carrie." He sighs. "I feel sorry for you, then. I worry that you'll never find true love. — Candace Bushnell

I really liked it." She covers her mouth in horror.
"If I like sex, do you think it means I can't be a feminist?"
"No." I shake my head. "Because being a feminist
I think it means being in charge of your sexuality. You decide who you want to have sex with. It means not trading your sexuality for ... other things."
"Like marrying some gross guy who you're not in love with just so you can have a nice house with a picket fence."
"Or marrying a rich old geezer. Or a guy who expects you to cook him dinner every night and take care of the children," I say, thinking of Samantha.
"Or a guy who makes you have sex with him whenever he wants, even if you don't," Miranda concludes.
We look at each other in triumph, as if we've finally solved one of the world's great problems. — Candace Bushnell

I said, 'Never. Because I don't consider my work a job. I consider it a career. And you don't quit a career.' That shut her up for a minute. Then she asked where I went to college. — Candace Bushnell

Eight hundred and more years later, more than three and a half thousand miles away, and now more than one thousand years ago, a storm fell upon our ancestors' city like a bomb. Their childhoods slipped into the water and were lost, the piers built of memories on which they once ate candy and pizza, the boardwalks of desire under which they hid from the summer sun and kissed their first lips. The roofs of houses flew through the night sky like disoriented bats, and the attics where they stored their past stood exposed to the elements until it seemed that everything they once were had been devoured by the predatory sky. Their secrets drowned in flooded basements and they could no longer remember them. Their power failed them. Darkness fell. — Salman Rushdie

Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal. — Anton Chekhov

ANNABETH WANTED TO HATE NEW ROME. But as an aspiring architect, she couldn't help admiring the terraced gardens, the fountains and temples, the winding cobblestone streets and gleaming white villas. After the Titan War last summer, she'd gotten her dream job of redesigning the palaces of Mount Olympus. Now, walking through this miniature city, she kept thinking, I should have made a dome like that. I love the way those columns lead into that — Rick Riordan

All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness, and by that promise giving it — F Scott Fitzgerald

There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already. — Ian McEwan

This town has done us dirty
This town has bled us dry
We've been here for a long time
And we'll be here 'til we die
So we'll finish off the leavings
Of blood and glue and beer
And burn this bloody city down
In the summer of the year — Shane MacGowan

I've never understood sexy lingerie. I mean, what's the point? The guy's only going to take it off. — Candace Bushnell