Budapest City Quotes

(Jace) "Is there anything special you want to see? Paris? Budapest? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?" Only if it falls on Sebastian's head, she thought.

I am with you. I'm not going anywhere." "Is there anything special you want to see? Paris? Budapest? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?" Only if it falls on Sebastian's head, she thought. "Can we travel to Idris? I mean, I guess, can the apartment travel there?" "It can't get past the wards." His hand traced a path down her cheek. "You know,I really missed you." "You mean you haven't been going on romantic dates with Sebastian while you've been away from me?" "I tried", Jace said, "but no matter how liquored up you get him , he just won't put out.

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

(The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.)

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Cities tend to reflect the character of their residents. Budapest is a dramatic, theatrical kind of place. More than anything else it resembles a stage set.

Our true city is the new Jerusalem, even while we still belong to Paris or Budapest or New York.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” —Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

It is said that you are a New Yorker the moment you remember the way New York used to be. This miraculous place lives to obliterate its history. It is history as fashion. Trend. Moments. Moments lost and... overwritten. You have to hunt the past in NY. Not like Prague. Budapest. Krakow. Paris. Istanbul. These places wear their pasts with honor over their hearts. A woman. Not a girl. New York... is youth. Always trying on new masks, new faces.

We glided into Budapest at twilight, the city poured over with a viscous glowing blue, lights already blazing on the splendid Western bridges. Upside-down electronic billboards were reflected in the river, advertising Tuborg beer and Minolta cameras.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow . . . The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

and eastern Europe, to settle in town, especially in the capital cities of the Habsburg and Wilhelmine empires. It was in the context of this multiform upheaval – the demographic growth and the urbanization process generated by the industrial revolution, modernization and assimilation – that German Jewry acquired a new profile. Vienna, where no more than 2,000 Jews had lived in 1850, counted more than 200,000 on the eve of the First World War, or 10 per cent of the total population; in the same timeframe, the Jewish population of Berlin grew from less than 10,000 to nearly 200,000, here making up 7 per cent of the total population.12 The Jewish populations of Budapest, Prague, Lvov, Krakow and Czernowitz underwent similar growth.

In the thirteenth century, the Mongols entered Europe after conquering Russia. Economically, it was an incomparably daintier tidbit than the semideserted peasantries of Russia. The knights of Europe gathered together an army and, near Budapest, there was an epoch-deciding battle between the nomads and the Europeans. The nomads utterly destroyed the Europeans. Europe lay before them. But they didn’t even enter Budapest. After camping for a little while beneath its walls, they turned around and headed back to the steppes of Russia. For what reason did the army of Khan Batu neither enter nor conquer Europe? The Mongols explained it in this way: There’s not enough room for our horses in European cities. Having been born on vast steppes, they felt insecure on city streets. They didn’t understand urban spaces. It follows that one cannot conquer or attempt to possess that which one doesn’t understand.

A new spirit had taken hold of Eastern Europe by 1900. It might be most easily characterized as a violent disjuncture between the heart and the head. Materially, things had never been better. Europe was nearing the end of almost a half-century of (barely) interrupted peace. Most adults had never heard a shot fired in anger. That same half-century witnessed an unprecedented burst of economic growth and technical innovation. When steamships were dropping passengers off at Dereszewicze, citizens of Budapest were already riding the city's first underground metro line, which had opened in 1896. Cities, for the first time, were illuminated at night, something Eastern Europe took an unexpected lead in: Lviv was the first city to use modern kerosene lamps, and Timişoara, in present-day Romania, was the first city in Europe to be lilt by electricity. Railways now crisscrossed the continent, reaching even Janina's home in the forgotten Lithuanian hamlet of Bieniakonie. Grain from Ukraine flooded the American market, while wood from the remotest forests of Lithuania could be shipped all the way to Liverpool and beyond. Buoyed by these new connections, landowners grew suddenly and unexpectedly rich. . . . But however prosperous things might have seemed, spiritually there was a feeling of mounting crisis. Everywhere people put their trust in progress and scientific discovery, to the detriment of older faiths. In politics, nationalism still held sway -- indeed its influence had never been greater -- but in the arts, its primacy had begun to wane. The great national bards were still being celebrated, ut more as icons of struggle than as writers to be read. Young people especially craved something new.

The week of the Reagan funeral, makeshift shrines of flowers and such sprung up at Eureka College and in Dixon, Illinois, at the presidential library in Simi Valley, at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, at the Reagan home in Bel Air, and in towns and villages across the nation. Memorials appeared, too, in Prague and Budapest and in cities and villages across the former “Captive Nations” of the Baltics, as well as in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Few, if any, were visible on the campus of Harvard or in the tony Georgetown section of Washington, nor in the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In cities like Paris or Budapest, your senses opened to take in experiences, but Jyväskylä nurtured dullness.

The Left has governed the great cities of the world before. Paris, Marseilles, Madrid, London under Red Ken, have all succumbed to the siren song of the Left at odd moments in the not too distant past. Barcelona was in fact once governed by committees of anarchists. Rome, Milan, and Naples have fallen under the Red Thumb. Stalinist proxies ruled Prague and Warsaw and Budapest and the traffic flow kept moving. The Communists took the garbage out in Moscow.

As a result, by the early twentieth century, large Jewish concentrations could be found in cities across the globe, including Baghdad (one-third of the population), Salonika (50 percent), Warsaw, Łódź, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Buenos Aires. Indeed, 25 percent of the world’s Jewish population lived in a mere fourteen

and instead of allowing the visa holders for Palestine to leave, he might deport them all to Poland instead. For another, he will have to be very discreet when he contacts people to let them know that he has organised a train that will take them to the safety of a neutral nation, and he’ll have to swear them to secrecy, or there will be a riot when others discover that there’s a list and they aren’t on it. Past the squares and monuments that made Budapest a showcase of Austro-Hungarian architecture, they drive through shabby outer suburbs whose buildings look as defeated as the people in the streets. Soon they have left the city behind. Sitting in the back seat of the official car that Kurt Becher has provided, Miklós thinks about Becher’s unexpected co-operation. Although he is reluctant to admit this even to himself, in any other circumstances, he would probably have liked this man. It’s gratifying to be treated like an equal by a high-ranking Nazi officer instead of as a Jew who could be deported

And so we visit the past as tourists. Sometimes this is literally so, when we take in Colonial Williamsburg and Plymouth Plantation, or travel around to Civil War battlefields. But it is also true in a metaphorical sense. The past has become a strange and distant country, full of odd people and mysterious customs. And thought seeing how these people built their homes or raised their children can broaden the mind, most of us don’t go back home determined to learn how to use an axe or a hickory stick. Knowledge about those strange customs might be interesting, but it is not essential–it does not change our way of doing things. In the end we will always prefer our own land in the present. At the end of the tour there is an air-conditioned car and a comfortable hotel room waiting, complete with cable television and refrigerated food. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoying the past this way–it can be a lot of fun, in fact. But it could be so much more. The thousands of people who visit Boston and have only a few days to walk the Freedom Trail, visit Fenway Park, and eat a lobster dinner cannot even scratch the surface of what the city is really like. They have not inhaled the comforting mixture of exhaust fumes and roasted cashews that hangs in the city subways on humid summer days, or learned to love the particular slant of the New England sun on a winter afternoon. The same would be true of a Bostonian on a day trip to Chicago, Tokyo, Budapest, or Khartoum. The visit would be exciting, but would not make them cosmopolitan. Becoming something more than a casual time-tourist requires a willingness to be challenged and changed, just as living in India or Ghana or Peru will upend any American’s assumptions about money and wealth. (pp 26-27)

The Skipper tied up at a disused quay near Csepel, left a skeleton crew, and sent everybody else over on liberty and went on a meditative bender himself in Budapest, his thoughts far from festive. The city had a long history of suicide, attracting pilgrims from all over the world seeking a Lourdes not of hope but of despair, assuming that suicide in Budapest, like love in Paris or greed in New York, would be somehow more authentic.

The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn't feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.