The Chekhov of the suburbs.
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 solanasI 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 dubuffetFifty 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 majorHow 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 orwellMore 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.
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.
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.
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