It is perfectly banal to establish a city in the middle of nature but it is perfectly extraordinary to establish nature in the middle of a city! Ordinary nations do the first, extraordinary nations do the second!

In one opinion, the house in which you stay, the church you attend and the town in which you reside may not determine the size of your dreams, but they can influence the rate of maturity of what you have planted.

The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)

Is your life really so bad? This city is full of opportunities –”“Can you call it a city?” Marcus asked. “No gymnasium, no theatre, no forum? Where is the life a Roman man should lead?

One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

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.

One is too precious about the past, the other too hungry for the future. One arm being dragged into the past by the ethics of historic preservation, the other being yanked towards a hopeful (bigger, brighter, better) future.

Oh you dear companionsElectric bells of the stations song of the reapersButcher's sleigh regiment of unnumbered streetsCavalry of bridges nights livid with alcoholThe cities I've seen lived like mad women(The Voyager)

Misli su uvek nečije. Moje su tvoje. Osvrćem se oko sebe. Gde si? Grad mi je pred očima i iza leđa, pulsira, tmulo, tmasto. Ukorenjeni ritam večne pretnje, svireposti koja ne bira kada će da udari.

I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.

Here too, as in the Commune almost a century earlier, the struggle was articulated around the hope that 'the antithesis between the everyday and the Festival--whether of labour or of leisure--will no longer be a basis for society.

We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.)

What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.