New Orleans is stirring, rattling, and sliding faintly in its fragrance and in the enormous richness of its lust; taxis are still parked along Dauphine Street and the breastlike, floral air is itchy with the stilletos and embroiderings above black blood drumthroes of an eloquent cracked indiscoverable cornet, which exists only in the imagination and somewhere in the past, in the broken heart of Louis Armstrong; yet even in that small portion which is the infested genitals of that city, never free, neither of desire nor of waking pain, there are the qualities of the tender desolations of profoundest night.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

A very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.