“Cities have a social utility, if only as places to get away from.”

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

“Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here's one more place that can't hold me.”

“That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.”

“It’s astonishing to me how many places in America, not way, way far away from cities, but in cities and near cities that don’t have access to broadband. And that disadvantages kids who are asked to do homework using the internet. 5 million of them live in homes without access to the internet. So you talk about an achievement gap, it starts right there.”

“Greek Phanariot merchants and traders dominated the commerce of the Ottoman empire, utilizing their kinship networks and social and religious institutions to maximize not only their business and assets, but also their cultural capital. Diaspora Greeks became especially prominent from the eighteenth century in the development of printing and the press, and experienced a major intellectual revival in cities as far afield as Vienna, Venice, Odessa, Paris, and Amsterdam”

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”

“Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from.”

“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.”

“How I'd love to get away from here and be someone else for a while in a place where no one knows or expects certain things from me.”