Urban Street Quotes & Sayings

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.
It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.
The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.
("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes") — Cornell Woolrich

All you need is love...and a great story. — Hank Fielder

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style. The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste. There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture. — Ada Louise Huxtable

In a battle which might interest scholars of modern urban warfare, the Conduit Street Comanche whipped the tar out of an irregular band of crybaby destitutes who pledged allegiance to the Watson's departed mucker-wallah. — Kim Newman

But ideal cities are very much the product of their own ages. Designed as complete urban statements, they bear the unmistakable imprint of their own culture and world view in every street and building. And yet to be successful a city has to be open to continuous development, free to evolve and grow with the demands of new times. Like science fiction accounts of the future, ideal cities quickly become outmoded. — P.D. Smith

We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it's beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it's shared and taken and fought for.
That's the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out? — Markus Zusak

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.' — Geoffrey Canada

If I had to be succinct, I guess I would say that urban magic works on the premise that magic is created by life. And life, these days, is about the underground, the buses, the street lamps, the smell of Chinese take away and the footsteps you half-thought you could hear behind you in the empty car park, but which are gone when you look again. — Kate Griffin

I came to a point where I couldn't walk into an urban store and find anything I liked. Everything was just getting too baggy, everything was getting so over [priced]. It's as if what I wanted in street wear was nowhere in stores, with no disrespect to any hip-hop brands. — K-Maro

Stories fill my mind just as sand fills a vase. — Christopher CJX Joseph

I'm a massive shopper. Topshop, Urban Outfitters - I'm pretty at home on the high street. — Sophie McShera

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. — Walter Benjamin

When I was three years old and in my mother's arms, she looked down at me and said, "Son, the way I'm taking care of you now, when you get old, always have a woman to take care of you like this." Dig this! All I'm goin' do is rest and dress, buy gasoline and lean. I'm goin' buy diamond rings and have the best of everything. I'm goin' pimp whores. — Donald Goines

Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way. — Steven Johnson

Tony's concern disintegrated. He could not understand C.J.'s determination to court death on a daily basis. Or maybe he did understand, and this was what caused his frustration. So many found the same solution his brother had. Selling death to their own people. The money was a difficult lure to resist. Additionally, the fear elicited from their hard core posturing proved nearly as addictive. They demanded to be heard, even though it didn't seem they had much to say. Perhaps the futility and smallness that characterized their lives was too overwhelming to articulate in any manner other than a primitive, incoherent scream. Maybe it was inevitable that those who felt they had no stake in society would opt to destroy it. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

At the last moment, Kellan swerved around him, quickly leaving the zombie behind.
"Why didn't you just hit him?" Jayden asked, turning to look behind us as we sped away. I did, too. The zombie spun around as he immediately started to follow us.
"I didn't want to mess up my paint job," Kellan sarcastically replied as he turned on the street that would lead us to the store. "Plus, I just washed it. — Rose Wynters

There's a reason you probably haven't heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can't be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn't the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives' beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place ... — Thomas Frank

A cat came out of an alley, took a look at all the snow, and went back in. Farther on up the street a fat man, aproned and puffing, emerged from a restaurant and whiffed the cold air and gazed yearningly at the sky. As though even the dreams were up there, much too far away. — David Goodis

Living is deeper than just life — Tru Lyfe

In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the corner. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the pont of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky? — Damon Knight

Your dad was in a street gang? My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement — Chuck Palahniuk

Welcome," the man said in utter contradiction to his urban street clothes. He eyed the vibrator in Cooper's hand but whatever his thoughts were on a guy wielding a vibrator, he kept to himself. "I'll get some candles. — Jill Shalvis

Especially in urban areas, nobody cares so much [about castes], because you are forced to live in the same buildings. There is so, so little space. You can't be thinking about whether you are living in a street that has only Brahmins, or in a building that has been touched only by Muslims or Christians. You just live there, because that's the only place that you can find. So such distinctions just crumble away. There are people who maintain them, at all costs. But for the most part, it doesn't matter. — Anita Rau Badami

I'm naming my son just what he is. I'm a whore and he is my son. If he grows up ashamed of me, the hell with him. That's what I'm wantin' to name him, and that's what it's goin' to be. Whoreson! — Donald Goines

Keep The Drama In Your Books, Not Your Life." - The Cartel Publications. — T. Styles

I'm the muhfucka that did this to you! If y'all don't know me, you better get to know me, or fuck around and wind up wit' a hole in your forehead. — Brooklyn June

Street culture is a culture of containment. Most young people do not realize that it all too often leads to a "dead end". "Street culture," as I am using the term, is a counterforce to movement culture. Street culture in contemporary urban reality is synonymous with survival at all costs. This world view is mostly negative, because it demands constant adjustment to circumstances that are often far beyond young people's control or understanding, such as economics, education, housing, employment, nutrition, law, and so forth. — Haki R. Madhubuti

David Henderson's 1970 poem "Keep on Pushing," also analyzed the geographies of urban warfare in the Summer of 1964's Harlem Riots. Henderson warned of the crude mathematics of wide avenues that can swallow protest pickets, easily dismantle popular barricades, and muster five hundred cops in fifteen minutes, but he also suggests how, "For Harlem/ reinforcements come from the Bronx / just over the three-borough Bridge. / a shot a cry a rumor / can muster five hundred Negroes / from idle and strategic street corners / bars stoops hallways windows. — Anonymous

Only the myopic magnifying lens of the television camera maintains the demonstration, march, and picketing as a modality of political expression; they have otherwise faded into meaninglessness since the end of the Vietnam War with the shift of urban form and activity. These acts and activities have been displaced over the past decade from the square and main street to the windswept emptiness of City Hall Mall or Federal Building Plaza. To encounter a ragtag mob of protesters in such places today renders them enve more pathetic, their marginality enforced by a physcial displacement into so unimportant, uninhabited, and unloved a civic location. — Trevor Boddy

Once I have the finished sculpture, I'll put it out on the street or in nature or somewhere where it interacts with the environment. Really it's kind of the idea of turning the street into a stage and this sort of urban theater has a life of its own. If you have creative drive, and you need to manifest it, then you need some sort of medium to do that through. For me, it worked out with sculpture, and tape just is a means of doing sculpture. — Mark Jenkins

That's my little piece of heaven. Go ahead."
Ciro followed Remo through the open door to a small enclosed garden. Terra-cotta pots positioned along the top of the stone wall spilled over with red geraniums and orange impatiens. An elm tree with a wide trunk and deep roots filled the center of the garden. Its green leaves and thick branches reached past the roof of Remo's building, creating a canopy over the garden. There was a small white marble birdbath, gray with soot, flanked by two deep wicker armchairs.
Remo fished a cigarette out of his pocket, offering another to Ciro as both men took a seat. "This is where I come to think."
"Va bene," Ciro said as he looked up into the tree. He remembered the thousands of trees that blanketed the Alps; here on Mulberry Street, one tree with peeling gray bark and holes in its leaves was cause for celebration. — Adriana Trigiani

McGahern still lives on and works a farm in Leitrim, and friends say that even though he has held high profile academic posts round the world as a visiting professor he remains essentially a countryman.

Last term he taught in an upstate New York college, but seeing him in the soulless urban grid of downtown Syracuse wearing an old tweed flat cap and long black overcoat, he could have been in an Irish agricultural town on market day as he casually engaged strangers on the street to ask for advice on finding a decent restaurant. Friends say he has extraordinary confidence in who he is and where he's from - he behaves pretty much the same way wherever is and whoever he is with. — John McGahern

All governments, even these precious "democracies," derive all their power by force. Do something the government doesn't want, like, say, cross the street against the light, refuse to submit to its authority, and it won't be long before they'll use some form of force, usually a weapon and the threat of death or injury, to compel you to comply. — S. Evan Townsend

What does it take to get you on board with building this district to mirror Coral Gables or the Hamptons? — Thomas Barr Jr.

I'm going to be a fashion icon in a minute. I'm not going to do it in a corny manner. I have a voice that speaks for a whole other market - not just black people, but high fashion urban people. I mix street wear with high fashion. It's never been seen before. — ASAP Rocky

Luke! ... We have to be able to do cool dancing so we don't embarrass our child!"
"I'm a very cool dancer," replies Luke. "Very cool indeed,"
"No you're not!"
"I had dance lessons in my teens, you know," he retorts. "I can waltz like Fred Astire."
"Waltz?" I echo derisively. "That's not cool! We need to know all the street moves. Watch me."
I do a couple funky head-wriggle body-pop maneuvers, like they do on rap videos. When I look up, Luke is gaping at me.
"Sweetheart," he says. "What are you doing?"
"It's hip-hop!" I say. "It's street!"
"Becky! Love!" Mum has pushed her way through her dancing guests to reach me. "What's wrong? Has labour started?"
Honestly. My family has no idea about contemporary urban steet dance trends. — Sophie Kinsella

Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region. — William Fulton

I was never particularly a part of the following of tango; I just liked it ... most of all, I recognized that the urban content and the approach seemed very familiar and very connected to the songs that I was doing, the kind of songs that I wanted to write - the songs about the street. — Ruben Blades

I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation; perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone. — Michael Eric Dyson

With 'Street Fight,' it took an urban mayoral election and found lots of complexity in there. The same with 'Racing Dreams.' I wanted to show complexity within this world that most documentary people don't know anything about. — Marshall Curry

Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda's voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it's indelibly her own. — Dennis Lehane

Gypsy cabs jostled and honked...Dollar vans lined the sidewalk and people piled in and out. As I walked down the slope, the buildings grew smaller and squalid. Trees vanished...and the heat picked up. Beyond the brick wall of the Navy Yard, the silver skyline of Manhattan glimmered in the distance like a mirage. The industrial remains of the flats were low and decrepit and mostly abandoned, though a few beeping forklifts unloaded trucks here and there. The storefronts were shuttered except for a bank busy with Orthodox Jews. The funk of a chicken processing plant contaminated the air.

I walked along the high brick wall that separated the Navy Yard from the street, frequently stepping over pulverized vials that sparkled like jewels on the sidewalk. There was no shade. I blinked away the dust. — Andrew Cotto

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet. — Michael Montoure

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Becky! Love!" Mum has pushed her way through her dancing guests to reach me. "What's wrong? Has labor started?"
Honestly. My family has no idea about contemporary urban street dance trends. — Sophie Kinsella