Suburbs Quotes
More Suburbs Quotes
The Chekhov of the suburbs.
— Of John Cheever. Quoted in The Annual Obituary1982 (1983).
We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
john kenneth galbraith— The Guardian (UK, 1992-05-23)
I remembered Albany […] as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs.
james howard kunstler— Chapter 29, p. 140
Our "society" is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she's exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation, further, enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by being a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.
valerie solanas— p. 7 (line break in "non-"/"co-operation")
Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry...about the country, the suburbs and the seaside...then there come's love...and increasingly, the fear of death.
john betjeman— Radio Talk. BBC Third Programme (1949)
I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs.. ..As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.
jean dubuffet— Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Vol. II, Jean Dubuffet, Gallimard, Paris 1967, p. 63-73
Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.
jane jacobs— The Death And Life of Great American Cities, p. 30
Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist' and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.
john major— David Butler and Gareth Butler, "Twentieth Century British Political Facts", p. 296Speech to the Conservative Group for Europe, 22 April 1993. The reference to George Orwell is to his 1941 essay "The Lion and the Unicorn".
How sweet the air does smell even the air of a back-street in the suburbs after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!
george orwell— The morning after Orwell is let out of his first tramps' accommodation, or 'spike'
More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.
— The Landscape near an Aerodrome, Stanza 1
Of course, the entire effort is to put myself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. A hundred are killed In the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.
stephen spender— "Thoughts During An Air Raid"
What beauty and excellence can the founder of the city seen in this wretched city with its dust-laden air, its hot winds, its dry river-bed, its brackish nasty water and its thron covered suburbs.
— Emperor Jahangir, who called it dust city Gurdabad and several other names, in 1608, in Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency: Ahmedabad, Government Central Press, 1879, pp.254-55
Houses 10, one above another like seats in a theatre, built down the sides of an oval hole; more men cannot stand on a mountain than on the under plain. Dined in a garden, offered by a farrier of the town as we were looking for a tree in the suburbs:;; the man very civil and well behaved, which is the general character.
— George Berkeley, as quoted in Life and letters of George Berkeley by Alexander Campbell Fraser, Clarendon Press, 1871, p.559.
Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.
Havelock Ellis— Impressions and Comments, series 3
