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Quotations about Places
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned. ~Edward Abbey
New stones, new steeples are comely things; but the human heart clings to places that hold association and reminiscence. ~Christopher Morley, "To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence," 1921
Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — little rags and shreds of your very life. ~Katherine Mansfield
She fell in love with the place at first sight. ~May Sinclair, Far End, 1926
You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person. And I had fallen in love with Tahiti before ever I had set foot in it. ~Alec Waugh, 1930
The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Such, then, was our welcome to the Yosemite.... [I]f any single scene could in itself sum up all the chief beauties and marvels of our American West, this was the scene. Here was poetically epitomized and digested within the compass of a picture-frame much of the cliff-grandeur of the Arizona Canyon, the fascination of Yellowstone waterfalls, the call of Colorado's "silent peaks of aged snow," the charm of the huge park-like forests of the Pacific shore. It was the West at a glance. ~Robert Haven Schauffler, Romantic America, 1913
I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night.... I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. ~G.K. Chesterton, "A Meditation in Broadway," What I Saw in America, 1922
I grew up in the suburbs. I guess most people think of the suburbs as a place with all the disadvantages of the city and none of the advantages of the country. And vice versa. ~The Wonder Years, "Pilot," 1988, written by Neal Marlens and Carol Black [S1, E1, Narrator Kevin]
For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth for you. ~Mary Hunter Austin, The Lands of the Sun, 1927
A boy is a boy and he is the place he inhabits.... those mountains and deserts live in me still and when I go back into that country my heart surges with sudden blood. The past hurls itself at me at times. My bones remember the water and the stones. I grew my body from that mountain earth, and my cells remember the cactus and pines, the lilies and grasses. ~Patrick Lane, What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered, 2004 [Okanagan, Canada
Traveling underground and living in a skyscraper may increase the New Yorker's difficulty in making both ends meet. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1904, George Horace Lorimer, editor
GLOBE An all-round proposition which has furnished its shareholders a living for several thousand years, though its stock is two-thirds water. ~Charles Wayland Towne, The Foolish Dictionary, Executed by Gideon Wurdz, Master of Pholly, Doctor of Loquacious Lunacy, etc., 1904
That little ball that blusters so, spouting its seas in tempest, and sliding its hills,
Smothered in storm and lightning, and plagued with an uncertainty of flood and thirst,
Hot, cold, distempered, risky...
~James Oppenheim, "Report on the Planet, Earth," War and Laughter, 1916
...The chance-born Earth
Adrift in space...
~Henry Van Dyke, "The Grand Canyon: Daybreak," 1913
What is
this earth but an inhabited minor planet
lost among the stars?
~Frances Frost, Woman of this Earth, 1934
...the blue sky of Italy reflects itself in the waters below, until one feels as if he were floating in the air between sea and sky... No whir and rush of electric cars and motors; no click of the horses' feet on the asphalt pavement — no pavement, indeed, and no horses, no twentieth-century rush of life. It is Venice, it is June, and the two combine to make an illuminated chapter. To live in Venice is like being domesticated in the heart of an opal. ~Lilian Whiting, Italy, The Magic Land, 1907
I'm thinking of my child, my little one, who's under the roots of the grass. Those others have still got them in the flesh walking about, yet they've gone off to look for a better place. But for me, all that was dear to me has become the grass and water of this place, and I'll stay here until I become part of this earth as well. ~Jean Giono (1895–1970), Regain, 1930, translated from the French by Henri Fluchè and Geoffrey Myers, Harvest, 1939 [a little altered
Gloria to Tony: The first noble truth is: life is suffering. But the Buddha preached joyful participation in the sorrows of the world...
Tony to Dr. Melfi, (later): Well, I am improving. I mean, you gotta participate joyfully in the suffering of the world.
Dr. Melfi: Your thoughts have a kind of Eastern flavor to them.
Tony: Well, I've lived in Jersey my whole life.
~The Sopranos, "The Telltale Moozadell," 2001, written by Michael Imperioli
Providence hated Betty, and she hated Providence. She longed to get away to New York, where there were already forty thousand people, and more coming in so fast that the town was actually overtaking Philadelphia. New York was young and wicked and eager; and Betty Bowen was also all three. ~Rupert Hughes, The Golden Ladder, 1924 [set in 1794
But we ask you to look kindly on this our city of wonder, the city of amazing beauties which is also (to any man of quick imagination) an actual hell of haste, din, and dishevelment. ~Christopher Morley, "To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence," 1921 [New York City
And how we loved this strange, mad city of ours, which we knew in our hearts was, to the clear eye of reason and the pure, sane vision of poetry, a bedlam of magical impertinence, a blind byway of monstrous wretchedness. And yet the blacker it seemed to the lamp of the spirit, the more we loved it with the troubled eye of flesh. ~Christopher Morley, "To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence," 1921 [New York City
The ground is full of subway,
The air is full of El,
The streets are full of taxicab,
And I don't feel so well.
~W. T., "A Stranger in New York," 1926
Moving into new quarters, as many of us know from experience, is a mixture of anticipation and regret. ~David McCord, 1955
Today, in these middle years of the twentieth century, from Los Angeles the mounting tide of humanity has oozed through the intervening canyons and spilled out into the wide Mojave. Solitude is receding at the rate of four and a half kilometres per annum. ~Aldous Huxley, 1954
Rennes has the air of being a very completed place. It is unhurried and satisfied with itself. It has the unemphatic calm of an aquatint. Like all the rest of this planet it is rushing through space at so many thousands of miles a minute, and through time and change with an even more terrible velocity. But it does not know it. It was making no more fuss about it than a dog sleeping in the sun.
Houses, like hearts, are living, loving,
Joyful or woeful,
Forget or are forgot;
Houses, like tired hearts,
Sicken at last, and die,
Crumble and rot...
~Leonora Speyer, "In Praise of Abrigada," c.1922
Men make houses; women make homes; necessity makes boarding-places, and flats happen. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
The ruin of an edifice is as much its ghost as a phantom is that of man. ~Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three, 1874
But the real heart and core of the country are not to be come at in a month's vacation. One must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions. Pine woods that take two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots that lie by in the sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs that grow fifty years before flowering, — these do not scrape acquaintance. ~Mary Hunter Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 1903
A kindness for graveyards, and a superadded leaning to the old, battered, weed-grown ones, are not incompatible with the cheeriest spirit. ~Louise Imogen Guiney, "On Graveyards," Goose-Quill Papers, 1885
I don't know that a graveyard is a very good place to go to get cheered up, but it seems the only
A filing-cabinet of human lives
Where people swarm like bees in tunneled hive,
Each to his own cell in the towered comb,
Identical and cramped—we call it home.
~Gerald Raftery (1905–1986), "Apartment House," 1968
The subdued elegance of the room, its gentle, charming air of splendid, well-preserved
The house had become a part of herself, an extension of her body, a protective shell. She was uneasy when away from it. ~May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriett Frean, 1922
Alone in the Big Sur
I felt a chance to merge with the ghost of cliff and pine-tree...
~William Pillin, "The Blue Fear," 1957
Poetry in New York! In California it is, in a way, part of our life, with the sunshine and flowers, but you might as well expect orchids to grow on the walls of the sky scrapers as hope to find a soil for poetry in sterile and soulless Manhattan. ~A Californian, anonymous open letter to Miss Vera Fitch, 1910 October 29th
Californians are said to be the best insurance risks. We would say liars are the worst. ~Thomas Benjamin "Tom" Sims, 1923
Teacher says that Mississippi
Is the Indian name for "Father of Waters."
Why don't they call it Mister-sippi?
And is Miss-ouri one of his daughters?
~A. D. Condo, "A Puzzled Geographer," in St. Nicholas, February 1906
When you leave New York, you are merely camping out. ~Nat C. Goodwin
I had a dream that New York, over night,
Became supremely, laughably polite...
~Cupid Jones (Francis Saltus Saltus), "The Polite City," Fact and Fancy, 1895
I've noticed that the things people tell about after they come home from a trip depend a good deal on the disposition they carry with them on it. It's the way with Florida. If you're an optimist you'll come back and tell about the palms, roses and sunsets. If you're a pessimist you'll mention snakes, hotel bills and buzzards. ~Kate Trimble Sharber (b.1883), The Annals of Ann, 1910
Do you know, this country seems almost an impertinence. It is a respectable golf course. It is a piece of jewelry. Illeria is the setting, and Tania the gem. Arizona could wear the thing in her watch-chain and not feel the weight of it. A few mountains and defiles, — a furlong or two of vineyards, and a mile or so of sea-coast, a wonderful sapphire sky, — that is all. Add to this innumerable ruins falling beneath the iconoclastic pick of the archæologist... It ought to be transported bodily and made a permanent feature of the Buffalo Fair. Any wide-awake firm of contractors could do it in six months. ~Laura L. Livingstone (Herbert Dickinson Ward), Lauriel: The Love Letters of an American Girl, 1901 [Illyria
I believe God was having a good day when he made Alaska. ~Bob Ross, "Not Quite Spring," The Joy of Painting, 1992
There isn't any night club in the world you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you're with some girl that really knocks you out. ~J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
...a duel in France, is not like one in England; the former is a matter of course; a trifle of common occurrence; one makes an engagement to fight, in the same breath as an engagement to dine; but the latter is a thing of state and solemnity — long faces — early rising — and will making. ~Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman, 1828
It is astonishing how this... fills one with the imperial spirit, inflates one's chest with pride at the thought of the manner we English pervade the universe in our own blundering, valiant, hot-tempered, pugnacious, indomitable way. If we want a thing, we fight to the death for it; if we have wanted it wrongly, we are willing to kill our enemy all the same, and then sorrowfully apologise. But, after all, the spirit Mr. Kipling breathes into us is that we are men; that we are units of the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the greatest nation of all time. Surely this is a better belief than that we are a miserable, puny, puling tribe, whose empire is going down into darkness... ~"Diary of a Bookseller,"
Vermont? You don't mean that narrow, pinched-up little state on the wrong side of Boston? ~Dark Victory, 1939, written by Casey Robinson, based on a 1932 play In Time's Course by George Brewer, Jr. and Bertram Bloch, spoken by the character Judith Traherne
What a dear old wall that is that runs along by the river there! I never pass it without feeling better for the sight of it. Such a mellow, bright, sweet old wall; what a charming picture it would make, with the lichen creeping here, and the moss growing there, a shy young vine peeping over the top at this spot, to see what is going on upon the busy river, and the sober old ivy clustering a little farther down! There are fifty shades and tints and hues in every ten yards of that old wall. If I could only draw, and knew how to paint, I could make a lovely sketch of that old wall, I'm sure. I've often thought I should like to live at Hampton Court. It looks so peaceful and so quiet, and it is such a dear old place to ramble round in the early morning before many people are about. ~Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889
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