“It is astonishing to witness the struggles of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all those things that justify a city’s existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the Dark Ages. People camp out like Bedouins in deserts of brick.”
Naples '44
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Norman Lewis 21
British travel writer 1908–2003Related quotes

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

“By the year 2000, Oregon will be collapsed and the city of Rajneesh Puram will be existing.”
[Rajneesh Puram, Oregon/Frieda K., Nightline, ABC News, September 19, 1984, 2; no. 868]

“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”
Marmoream relinquo, quam latericiam accepi.
Quoted in Svetonius, Lives of the Cesars, Aug., XXVIII, 3

[When Cory’s gone, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2013/08/17/when-corys-gone, The Economist, 21 August 2018, August 17, 2013]
2013

“I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.”
Ibid., p. 367
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Gostava de estar no campo para poder gostar de estar na cidade.

Gertrude (1910)
Context: That life is difficult, I have often bitterly realized. I now had further cause for serious reflection. Right up to the present I have never lost the feeling of contradiction that lies behind all knowledge. My life has been miserable and difficult, and yet to others, and sometimes to myself, it has seemed rich and wonderful. Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.