Cities - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

A town, like an individual, has a right to live.

- J. T. McIntosh, ''Katahut Said No'' (1952)

The city hovered, then settled silently through the early morning darkness toward the broad expanse of heath which the planet's Proctors had designated as its landing place.

- James Blish, ''Earthman, Come Home'' (1953)

She was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard-breathing giant who never inhales.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''Saucer of Loneliness'' (1953)

The bigger the town, the more evil it seemed to hold, three centimeters under the frontal bone.

- Poul Anderson, ''Journeys End'' (1957)

Sinharat was a city without people, but it was not dead. It had a memory and a voice. [. . .] Sometimes the voice of Sinharat was soft and gentle, murmuring about everlasting youth and the pleasures thereof. Again it was strong and fierce with pride, crying You did, but I do not! Sometimes it was mad, laughing and hateful. But always the song was evil.

- Leigh Brackett, ''The Road to Sinharat'' (1963)

New York is a seething hell of hate and despair. It is a knife that flays each of us daily, reducing us to raw, quivering nerve ends. Such a witch's caldron of agony, terror and rage can't help but to boil over sooner or later.

- Jerrold J. Mundis, ''Do It for Mama!'' (1971)

The city was extraordinary, Breckenridge admitted: an ultimate urban glory, a supernal Babylon, a consummate Persepolis, the soul's own hymn in brick and stone.

- Robert Silverberg, ''Breckenridge and the Continuum'' (1973)

''Urban life is the ultimate human tragedy,'' said Alice. ''People can't escape except through catastrophe.''

- Jack Vance, ''Assault on a City'' (1974)

To wound the autumnal city.

- Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1975)

The City was unable to provide for all of man's needs. There was something missing, something primal and liberating, something that was now only a dessicated memory out of man's dark history.

- Thomas F. Monteleone, ''Breath's aWare That Will Not Keep'' (1976)

I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.

- William Gibson, ''Burning Chrome'' (1982)

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before.

- William Gibson, ''TheWinter Market'' (1985)

Bobby climbed down behind him, into the unmistakable signature smell of the Sprawl, a rich amalgam of stale subway exhalations, ancient soot, and the carcinogenic tang of fresh plastics, all of it shot through with the carbon edge of illicit fossil fuels.

- William Gibson, Count Zero (1986)

The city seemed to stretch about them like some pitiless abyss of geologic time.

- William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1991)

Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning.

- William Gibson, Virtual Light (1993)

The city sprawled like roadkill, spreading more with each new pressure.

- Steve Aylett, Atom (2000)