Quotes & Sayings About Urban Beauty

My body slid from human to wolf in a crack! of black smoke. Wolf was panting and I watched frost dissipate on my hot tongue, sending tiny rivulets of steam into the air. The world was sharp and clear, and I never realized how many different colors of shadow there were. It made me savor the dark beauty of night even more. — Heather Heffner

When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life. — Ada Louise Huxtable

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts. — Rebecca Solnit

It is not, of course, only the Japanese who find flat sterile surfaces attractive and kirei. Foreign observers, too, are seduced by the crisp borders, sharp corners, neat railings, and machine-polished textures that define the new Japanese landscape, because, consciously or unconsciously, most of us see such things as embodying the very essence of modernism. In short, foreigners very often fall in love with kirei even more than the Japanese do; for one thing, they can have no idea of the mysterious beauty of the old jungle, rice paddies, wood, and stone that was paved over. Smooth industrial finish everywhere, with detailed attention to each cement block and metal joint: it looks 'modern'; ergo, Japan is supremely modern. — Alex Kerr

When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them like red silk. A poetic fruit-seller had told them once that they looked like dryads, and they did still, only now they looked like dryads who had tired of snagging their hair on brambles and sliced it all off on the edge of a knife. — Laini Taylor

I never saw true beauty till this night. — Lisa Kessler

The nightmare was shaped like a goddess - a beauty with a body curved to incite reckless sinning. She wore an angry pout that he knew would burn his mouth. She had hair like snow and eyes as cold and fathomless as the deepest reaches of space. How like a nightmare to seduce and terrify at the same time. — Erin Kellison

The auto industry must acknowledge that a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility. — Stewart Udall

Don't be afraid," he said. "Art is full of agony and beauty. The pen itself a sword of pleasure and pain, isn't it, my poet? — Lisa Carlisle

He closed the damn door and turned and stopped, looking at her. "Sometimes," he said softly, and stopped, then started again, "I often wonder why human men are so fixated on how a woman looks when there's so much more to explore, and so many kinds of beauty - why obsess over one particular version? But sometimes, when I look at you, I understand."
And sometimes, when he looked at her the way he was now, she was beautiful. Not just okay. Not even really pretty. Beautiful. — Eileen Wilks

And why did this Probert pretend to be so Welsh? I remembered that like me he'd been awarded nought for Welsh in School Certificate. Such a result, in that language, means an almost psychotic ignorance. It's standard practice, of course, with writers of Probert's allegiance to pretend to be wild valley babblers, woaded with pit-dirt and sheep-shit, thinking in Welsh the whole time and obsessed by terrible beauty, etc., but in fact they tend to come from comfortable middle-class homes, have a good urban education, never go near a lay preacher and couldn't even order a pint in Welsh, falling back, as Probert had done earlier in the evening, on things like the Welsh for big Jesus. (And don't tell me they can think in Welsh without knowing the language. Ever tried thinking in Bantu?) — Kingsley Amis

I didn't tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun. — Kamila Shamsie

Is Ceres beautiful?" I asked curiously. "Julian seems to indulge in vanity."
"Do ducks float?" Marcy chuckled. "Do gerbils love to run around in clear balls?"Um, maybe? "She's stunningly beautiful. We're talking flawless beauty. Most gods and goddesses are. Back in the day, they had to get people to believe in them and pray for them. Nobody is going to put faith in a toothless bag lady. — Amanda Carlson