The city is squalid and sinister, With the silver-barred street in the midst, Slow-moving, A river leading nowhere.

Santa Barbara people are conservative-not like in L.A., where everybody wears rhinestones on their glasses to show that they own an airplane factory.

No wonder the streets had seemed so empty. The city [Minneapolis] had gone somewhere else and cunningly hidden itself inside its own fagade.

The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.

One of the things people are fleeing when they leave the city is the need either to reject people who are less well educated than themselves, or to accept them with all that implies for their children's education and future placement in the society.

What is the city but the people?

The city man, in his neon-and-mazda glare, knows nothing of nature's midnight. His electric lamps surround him with synthetic sunshine. They push back the dark. They defend him from the realities of the age-old night.

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.