“In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.”

— Orhan Pamuk, book A Strangeness in My Mind

Source: A Strangeness in My Mind

Last update Oct. 2, 2023. History

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Orhan Pamuk55

Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literatu… 1952

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“What a city, what a night, what a crowd, what a bomb, what a mistake, what a wanker you have for a President.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

Acceptance speech at the MTV Europe Music Awards, referring to French nuclear testing in Pacific (1995)

“If you go back a couple of hundred years to when the European cities really started to grow and peasants left the land to seek their future in the cities there was a saying that “city air makes you free” and the people who have come to London all races, creeds and colours have come for that. This is a city that you can be yourself as long as you don’t harm anyone else. You can live your life as you chose to do rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a city in which you can achieve your potential. That, I think, is our strength and that is what the bombers seek to destroy. They fear that freedom, they fear a world in which the individual makes their own life choices and their own moral value judgements and that is what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Press conference (8 July 2005)

“Cities make you afraid.”

Conn Iggulden book Empire of Silver

Khan: Empire of Silver

“Mexico city is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not struck; by the fact of being there at all, you are traveling. But in Panama, crossroads of the world, you are exactly so much aging tissue. You have to make arrangements with Pan Am or the Dutch Line for removal of your body. Otherwise, it would stay there and rot in muggy heat, under a galvanized iron roof.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Queer: A Novel (1985)

“Don't let the wicked city get you down.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

“A multi-colored crowd streaked about,
and suddenly all was totally changed.
It wasn't the usual city racket.
It came from a strange land.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"The First Long Range Artillery Fire On Leningrad," translation by Daniela Gioseffi (1993) http://users.tellurian.net/wisewomensweb/OnPrgudc.html

“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

Cross of Gold Speech (1896)

“For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.”

Mark Helprin book Winter's Tale

Source: Winter's Tale

“Homesickness hits hardest in the middle of a crowd in a large, alien city.”

Christos Tsiolkas (1965) Australian writer

Source: Barracuda

“In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.”

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Orhan Pamuk55

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