Quotes & Sayings About Tall Buildings

Come on. I know you're not a stupid man.'
'I'm quite stupid. Ask anyone.'
'Finbar, are there superheroes living among us?'
Finbar snorted with laughter and Kenny started to feel a little thick. 'Superheroes? In tights and capes, flying around? If there were superheroes, Mr. Journalist, don't you think they'd be in New York or somewhere like that? There's not that many tall buildings for Spiderman to swing from in Dublin, you know? He'd have maybe two good swings and then hang there looking disappointed.'
'These people don't wear tights and capes, Finbar.'
'So they're naked superheroes? That's grand for now, but when the good weather is over they're going to regret it.'
'They look like us. They dress like us. But they're not like us. They're different.'
'You,' Finbar said. 'Are sounding very racist right now. — Derek Landy

Many of the projects I'm most proud of are tall buildings, especially the housing projects. In New York I have two: one in Kips Bay and one at New York University. At that time, those projects were most challenging. — I.M. Pei

Big trees grow from sprouts, tall buildings rise from mounds of earth; the loftiest heights start at your feet. — Lao-Tzu

Heroes didn't leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn't wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back. — Jodi Picoult

Attachment parenting, Sears writes, "immunizes children against many of the social and emotional diseases which plague our society," producing children who are "compassionate," "caring," "admirable," "affectionate," "confident," and "accomplished" ("faster than a speeding bullet," "more powerful than a locomotive," and "able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" seem to have been left off the list!). — Emily Matchar

Did people come here to commit suicide? They were bound to. Cliffs, bridges, tall buildings, they were like an invitation. Just stand there, looking down, was to create an optical illusion of the ground rushing up to meet you. — Martyn Bedford

He also could feel it in his nostrils like an impalpable soot; the emanations of the millions about them, packed away at night in layers like martins in martin boxes and by day wriggling and squirming down between the tall buildings like larvae enclosed within the ribs of a dead horse; and with this effluvia of humans, the taint of burnt gasoline and burnt lubricating oils and the smoke and the coal grit and the dirt motes that were churned and rechurned and never at rest - the Pollen of the City. — Irvin S. Cobb

And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again. — F Scott Fitzgerald

He stalked through the narrow streets and wound his way down an alley between two buildings to an old, rotting wooden door. He paused to knock at it, three measured strokes followed by two quick ones, and it opened at once. Her batman, Sark, stood on the other side of it. The fellow reminded Espira of a hunting spider - he was warriorborn, tall, gaunt, with long, slender limbs and hands that seemed a little too large for the rest of him. His hair was black and short, and covered his face, head, neck, and what showed of his hands in a sparse, spidery fuzz. Sark had the feline eyes of his kind, one of them set at a slight angle to the other, so that Espira could never be sure precisely where the man was looking. — Jim Butcher

I don't think things necessarily should have a meaning. If stuff has a meaning then why do [writing] about it? If you're trying to say, 'Tall buildings are great' why not just leave it at that: "Tall buildings are great." — Jonathan Meades

A ghetto has tall buildings and empty lots, trash all over the street and city noise. Here the houses are two stories; the houses have trees in front and everyone has a yard. I always told Tracy she was wrong, but now I think Tracy was right. The ghetto looks different in different places, but if you live there, it makes you feel the same. — Heidi W. Durrow

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second ... to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn't be found, shacks where families lived who didn't even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was. — Ron Rash

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller. — Dejan Stojanovic

Having grown up here, I always wonder what it would be like to see this city as a tourist. Is it ever a disappointment? I have to believe that New York always lives up to its reputation. The buildings really are that tall. The lights really are that bright. There's truly a story on every corner. But it still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions. To not feel the bright lights even as they fill the air. To see the tall buildings and only feel a deep longing for the stars. — David Levithan

New York used to be so much more than just a place to shop. It was life on the street for the eccentrics; it was an eccentric city. It had many different tastes. Now it's just one - a really rich one - with big tall glass buildings. — Chris Noth

I won't give up on the one person who truly makes me feel like a superhero. You make me feel like I can leap tall buildings, like I can take on anything that life throws my way. I feel invincible as long as you're by my side. — Beth Michele

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue ...
And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that look like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. — Salman Rushdie

How remote we were too from the crazy musicians who arrived on a blustery fall day with the idea that, since this was a financial center, there would be a rain of coins from the tall buildings in response to their trumpet, guitar, and bass fiddle. The wind swirled their jazz among the canyons. I saw that no one was paying them the slightest attention. Feeling guilty, I threw them a quarter, but they didn't see it. They danced and made jazz in the cold, while upstairs we went on with our work, and they didn't exist, and it was nobody's fault. — Alan Harrington

Slowly the sky turned from the color of cornflower to that of hyacinth, and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island appeared like a ring of diamonds against the twilight. New York-that city made of canyons between tall buildings, and ornate houses filled with glittering things that might trap a girl forever-was nothing more than a few dots on an infinite landscape. The atmosphere was crystalline and afforded her a perfect view. Only from this place was she able to see how limited the city was, after everything, and how wide open the world could all of a sudden become. — Anna Godbersen

She'd always heard that Paris was elegant but had struggled to imagine how. She'd assumed it would be rigid; the demanding intolerance of perfection. But, being here, she was struck by the easy naturalness of everything. From the tall, slender trees, their leaves rustling high above her, to the chalky gravel that crunched beneath her feet or the classically proportioned buildings that rose, uniformly constructed from the same blonde stone, it was all orchestrated to hold the light. The entire city was enveloped in a halo of glowing softness. — Kathleen Tessaro

Children are born with imaginations in mint condition, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Then life corrects for grandiosity. — Phyllis Theroux

Heroes and heroines OR ... Your lead character doesn't have to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and he doesn't have to stop speeding bullets with his bare hands, but he darn well better know the difference between right and wrong, and he better be kind to animals, and it sure wouldn't hurt any if he brushed his teeth regularly"
Dean Koontz in "How To Write Best Selling Fiction — Dean Koontz

Far to our left I could see a commercial airliner on final approach to Soekarno-Hatta. Far to our right I could see the outline of tall city buildings. The imagery was hard to ignore. In the midst was an impoverished world filled with dangerous radicals. Some believed it was God's will to crash airplanes into buildings. Some recruited children to self-detonate on buses and in coffee shops. It must be incredibly difficult to hold fast to hope when you live in such a world. It's also hard to keep faith with humanity when religious ideology is used as an impetus for war. But I also believe that for every war there is a hero ... and for me, Jakarta will always be Indira's city. — Tucker Elliot

After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings. — Harry Seidler

I remember I went to Berlin right after the Wall came down. I first went to East Berlin, and all the buildings were old and falling down, and now when you go back to Berlin, you know you're in the East because all the buildings are brand new and very tall. — Moby

just like we did back then. But the upgrades weren't done yet, the builders still needed to expand the trench. So, now they are working on that. A couple of notable villagers moved into town. One was named Peter. He claimed to be a great builder and wants to build amazingly tall buildings. Peter proposed to the mayor that we start building higher structures because it would help save space since our town was growing — Steve The Noob

He had a mighty urge to pull out his pistol and let loose in every directon, right into the coffeehouse, smack through it's glass windows, till there was nothing but crashing and tinkling, right into the middle of the ruck of cars or simply into the middle of one of the gigantic buildings across the way, those ugly, tall, menacing buildings, or into the air, straight up, into the heavens, yes, into the hot sky, into the horrible, oppressive, vaporous, pigeon blue-grey sky, bursting it, sending the leaden lid crashing with one shot, smashing down and pulverizing everything and burying it all, all of it, the whole miserable, dreary, loud, stinking world ... — Patrick Suskind

Mumbai is different! It's busy, it's dusty, it's posh, it's different from everything I've ever known. You can barely see the sky, hidden behind the tall buildings, the moon seems so detached, the trees look indifferent and distant. — Debalina Haldar

It was almost as if we'd passed our gaze from the healthy skin of a supermodel to the ragged infections of a burn-victim's corpse. Any industry buildings that had once stood proudly in the city were now hollowed-out skeletons with tents decorating their innards. The tall apartment buildings were burned and then rebuilt into towering layers of jagged, cut metal, brightly colored canvas roofs, solar panels, and graffiti. — Michael-Scott Earle

I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.
And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.
The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun - curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway - lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.
Alex was right. It was gorgeous - one of the best I've ever seen. — Lauren Oliver

I have no fear of death, so I don't think about it. I love the adrenalin kick that danger brings. Others get their kicks bungee jumping from tall buildings. I'm very, very competitive. I want to be the best at everything I do. It's not driving - it's everything - it might be playing my guitar, I try to be the best at it as I possibly can. — Lewis Hamilton

Moms are, in my opinion, the wonders of the universe. They can leap tall buildings in a single bound, they can go where no person has gone before, and they can somehow get toddlers to eat. The problem is that mothers are also some of the most stressed people on the planet. There's just so much to do and not enough of them. — Kevin Leman

Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental. — Michael Mandelbaum

Today at Nariman Point the tall buildings crowd one another. But when I was young and in love with a grey-eyed man it was a marshy waste. We used to walk aimlessly along the quiet Panday Road or cross the Cuffe Parade to walk towards the sun. We did not have a place to rest. But in the glow of those evening suns, we felt that we were Gods who had lost their way and had strayed into an unkind planet.. — Kamala Suraiyya Das

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! — Steven Pinker

Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso. — Peter Orner

The sleepless hum of the city was abidingly in his ears, and the lamps that dotted the misty pavements stared at him blinkingly all along the route. The tall black buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and 'buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in the gloom.

("An Unexpected Journey") — J.H. Pearce

Buildings had collapsed-once tall and mighty, now headstones for the thousands buried underneath. — Marv Wolfman

Today, from the bridge, the East River is sparkling. The money is swirling around the tall buildings like tides or like tithes, And I wonder, does anyone swim in this river, I wonder, does anyone pray? — Katy Lederer

We have become so quick and effective in building things today. It would be easy to build another Pyramid of Giza or another Great Wall. But these buildings haven't withstood the test of time because of their building quality. They stand tall because they have a symbolic value, they represent a culture. — Zhang Xin

Yes, and I also like jumping out of tall buildings. — John Vanbiesbrouck

He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, "mildly unbalanced." He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews. Especially he didn't like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious. — Bill Bryson

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. — Banksy

I am all for greening tall buildings, but I'm also very keen to note that greening a building doesn't cope with the problem of the tall building in the texture of the city. — Joseph Rykwert

Edinburgh suited Ann; she liked the tall, dignified buildings of grey stone, the short days that sank into street-lamped evenings at five o'clock, and the dual personality of the city's main street, which on one side had glittering shops and on the other the green sweep of Princes Street Gardens. — Maggie O'Farrell

The faint metallic smell of the falling snow surrounds her. calm yourself. Listen. Cars splash along streets, and snowmelt drums through runnels; she can hear snowflakes tick and patter through the trees. She can smell the cedars in the Jarin des Plantes a quarter mile away. Here the Metro hurdles beneath the sidewalk; that's the Quai Saint-Bernard. Here the sky opens up, and she hears the clacking of branches: that's the narrow stripe of gardens behind the Gallery of Paleontology. This, she realizes, must be the corner of the quay and rue Cuvier. '
Six blocks, forty buildings, ten tiny trees in a square. This street intersects this street intersects this street. One centimeter at a time.
Her father stirs the keys in his packets. Ahead loom the tall, grand houses that flanked the gardens, reflecting sound.
She says, we go left — Anthony Doerr

He can't fly around tall buildings, or outrun a speeding train, the only talent he seems to have is leaving a nasty stain! — Tim Burton

Obviously the whole Wayward thing hasn't been explained to you properly. You don't have any superpowers. You can't leap over tall buildings in a single bound or fight Dark Casters with your magic cat. Basically, you're a glorified tour guide who's no better equipped to face a bunch of Dark Casters than Mary P. over here
-Ridley — Kami Garcia

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

We had our own sort of divorce back a while," I said.
"Yes."
"I was pretty crazy, I think."
"Yes," Susan said.
"You were pretty crazy," I said.
"Yes," she said. "I was."
"And we leapt tall buildings at a single bound."
"We were probably leaping the wrong ones," Susan said, "in those days."
"Maybe," I said. "But maybe those days helped us to leap the right ones now, and more gracefully. — Robert B. Parker

Stain Boy Of all the super heroes, the strangest one by far, doesn't have a special power, or drive a fancy car. next to Superman and batman, I guess he must seem tame. But to me he is quite special, and Stain Boy is his name. He can't fly around tall buildings, or outrun a speeding train, the only talent he seems to have is to leave a nasty stain. Sometimes I know it bothers him, that he can't run or swim or fly, and because of this one ability, his dry cleaning bill is sky-high. — Tim Burton

Seen from an aeroplane high in the air, even the most gigantic skyscraper is only a tall stone black, a mere sculptural form, not a real building in which people can live. But as the plane descends from the great heights there will be one moment when the buildings change character completely. Suddenly, they take on human scale, become houses for human beings like ourselves, not the tiny dolls observed from the heights. This strange tranformation takes place at the instant when the contours of the buildings begin to rise above the horizon so that we get a side view of them instead of looking down on them. The buildings pass into a new stage of existence, become architecture in place of neat toys
for architecture means shapes formed around man, formed to be lived in, not merely to be seen from outside. — Steen Eiler Rasmussen

Before them is the most beautiful city she has ever seen, has ever imagined. Golden rooftops shine brightly; windows made from diamonds and rubies gleam; tall buildings reach toward the clouds. She is again overwhelmed, this time with gratitude.
All this, for her. — Victoria Kahler

In the history of Russian pessimism, the general decrepitude of the university buildings, the gloomy corridors, the grimy walls, the inadequate light, the dismal look of the stairs, cloakrooms and benches, occupy one of the foremost places in the series of causes predisposing...And here is our garden. It seems to have become neither better nor worse since I was a student. I don't like it. It would be much smarter if, instead of consumptive lindens, yellow acacias, and sparse trimmed lilacs, there were tall pines and handsome oaks growing here. The student, whose mood is largely created by the surroundings of his place of learning, should see at every step only the lofty, the strong, the graceful...God save him from scrawny trees, broken windows, gray walls, and doors upholstered with torn oilcloth. — Anton Chekhov

If i should enter the house and speak with my own voice, at last, about its awful furnitutre, pulling apart the covering over the dusty bodies; the randy father, the husband holding ice in his hand like a blessing, the mother bleeding into herself and the small imploding girl, i say if i should walk into that web, who will come flying after me, leaping tall buildings? you? — Lucille Clifton

Both cities had numerous tall buildings, but that was pretty much where their similarities ended. While New York appeared dirty and lived in, Chicago was spotless and trash free, newer maybe. And where New York buzzed with constant energy, Chicago exuded more of a gentle hum. — J. Sterling

Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company). — Barbara Hambly

The principle of analogy is so simple, so natural, that everyone uses it in daily life. Imagine someone sitting down in front of the television after a long day at work. The first image he sees is that of a giant reptile squashing tall buildings. Is one's first hunch, "Oh! The news channel!"? Probably not. More likely one surmises the TV set had been left on the science fiction channel. Why? Because one's world of contemporary experience does not include newscasts of giant dinosaurs wreaking havoc in modern cities, but one has seen monster movies in which such disasters are quite typical. Which analogy does the TV screen image fit? — Robert M. Price

They say you never forget your first glimpse of Gehenna. Over the tall buildings the sky swirls with orange and red, true titian, a feature of the unique atmosphere. Of course that same air would kill human beings; hence they built the entire city inside a dome. Eternal sunset, that's why the place is so wild. You know the feeling you get, just before full dark? Sundown makes you feel like the world burgeons with possibility, and that's Gehenna for you.
Like any other romantic notion, it's based on bullshit, of course. Gehenna isn't the land of eternal sunset and infinite potential. The gas in the atmosphere just makes it impossible to see the sun. — Ann Aguirre

I was a real sucker for shiny lights and tall buildings. — Camille Perri

tall buildings and clustered streets of the city had her trapped like a mouse in a maze, without even the possible reward of cheese. — Charlie N. Holmberg

He was mostly leaping tall buildings in the beginning. There were cases where he would leap off a tall building or swoop down, and at that point he would look like he was flying, I suppose. It was just natural to draw him like that. — Joe Shuster

But me, maybe I fit in a place like this. Maybe the cold inside of me will seem less cold in this winter. Maybe the tall buildings will make the brick walls I build for myself seem smaller. Maybe the noises in my head will quiet down in the middle of all the other noises. Or maybe my cold and walls and noise will get worse. — Francesca Lia Block

(L)ife is like walking between two tall buildings on a tightrope. For some, the rope is wide enough and the walk is easy. For others, it's narrow and hard and maybe there's a strong wind blowing through their days — Walter Dean Myers