Harbour City Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Harbour City. Here they are! All 46 of them:

London - beautiful, immortal London - has never been a 'city' in the simplest sense of the word. It was, and is, a living, breathing thing, a stone leviathan that harbours secrets underneath its scales. It guards them covetously, hiding them deep within its body; only the mad or the worthy can find them.
Samantha Shannon (The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2))
In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I'd built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city -- a calm, sparkling city near the ocean, a place like Vancouver. I put myself there, and that's where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbour. I ate pancakes drizzled in syrup and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn't longing, and it wasn't insanity. It was relief. It got me through.
Amanda Lindhout (A House in the Sky)
I remember this country back when I was growing up. We went to church, we ate family suppers around the table, and it would never even have crossed a kid's mind to tell an adult to fuck off. There was plenty of bad there, I don't forget that, but we all knew exactly where we stood and we didn't break the rules lightly. If that sounds like small stuff to you, if it sounds boring or old-fashioned or uncool, think about this: people smiled at strangers, people said hello to neighbors, people left their doors unlocked and helped old women with their shopping bags, and the murder rate was scraping zero. Sometime since then, we started turning feral. Wild got into the air like a virus, and it's spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for once, they can't have it the second they want it. Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.
Tana French (Broken Harbour (Dublin Murder Squad, #4))
coasted up the Adriatic, its shores swimming in an atmosphere of amber, rose, and aquamarine; we lay in wide land-locked harbours, we roamed through ancient and noble cities,
Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)
As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colours spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels'...
Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria)
The boat entered the Harbour. The wide, bright city crowded up against the water, but drew back from its very edge; Ruth saw green parklands full of trees with white flocks of parrots burning out of them. The parrots surprised Ruth, she imagined Sydney to be more like England than Fiji.
Fiona McFarlane (The Night Guest)
Coming so close to death as a young child, only to resurface again into your life, imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness, a cavalier or even crazed attitude to risk. It could, I can see, have gone the other way, and made me into a person hindered by fear, hobbled by caution. Instead, I leapt off harbour walls. I walked alone in remote mountains. I took night trains through Europe on my own, arriving in capital cities in the middle of the night with nowhere to stay.
Maggie O'Farrell (I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death)
In all the lands ruled by that City, with its domes and its bronze and golden doors, its palaces and gardens and statues, forums and theatres and colonnades, bathhouses and shops and guildhalls, taverns and whorehouses and sanctuaries and the great Hippodrome, its triple landward walls that had never yet been breached, and its deep, sheltered harbour and the guarded and guarding seas, there was a timeworn phrase that had the same meaning in every tongue and every dialect. To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune – or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something to vast for his capacity. Valerius the Trakesian had become an Emperor.
Guy Gavriel Kay (Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1))
Gjøa was later presented as a gift to the city of San Francisco, remaining on display in Golden Gate Park until 1972, when it was returned to Norway. It now resides in Oslo harbour, next to two other famous Norwegian ships, Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki.
Stephen R. Bown (The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen (A Merloyd Lawrence Book))
Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
Plato (Timaeus)
We have so separated ourselves, person from person and group from group, in the city, that we have made hatred a dreadfully easy emotion. It comes to us as lightly and insidiously as the symptoms of an unconsciously harboured disease.
Jonathan Raban (Soft City: Picador Classic)
Almost two years had passed once again since his father's death. Hugo remained in the city, pure and strong as a virgin; for the man who harbours a god in his breast will remain untouched by the baseness which the world holds in store.
Adalbert Stifter (Tales of Old Vienna and Other Prose (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture and Thought: Translation Series))
It seemed to her the window was a great eye looking out over the city and the harbour and a strip of the gulf under ice. The new silence and emptiness was not entirely a loss; it was something of a relief. Aunt Gerda felt like a balloon, untied, soaring off its own way. But, she thought, it's a balloon that's bouncing against the ceiling and can't get free. She understood that this was no way to live; human beings are not built to float. She needed an earthly anchor of meaning and care so she didn't get lost in the confusion.
Tove Jansson (The Listener)
You. Man at the machine and man in the workshop. If tomorrow they tell you you are to make no more water-pipes and saucepans but are to make steel helmets and machine-guns, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Woman at the counter and woman in the office. If tomorrow they tell you you are to fill shells and assemble telescopic sights for snipers' rifles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Research worker in the laboratory. If tomorrow they tell you you are to invent a new death for the old life, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Priest in the pulpit. If tomorrow they tell you you are to bless murder and declare war holy, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Pilot in your aeroplane. If tomorrow they tell you you are to carry bombs over the cities, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Man of the village and man of the town. If tomorrow they come and give you your call-up papers, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Mother in Normandy and mother in the Ukraine, mother in Vancouver and in London, you on the Hwangho and on the Mississippi, you in Naples and Hamburg and Cairo and Oslo - mothers in all parts of the earth, mothers of the world, if tomorrow they tell you you are to bear new soldiers for new battles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! For if you do not say NO - if YOU do not say no - mothers, then: then! In the bustling hazy harbour towns the big ships will fall silent as corpses against the dead deserted quay walls, their once shimmering bodies overgrown with seaweed and barnacles, smelling of graveyards and rotten fish. The trams will lie like senseless glass-eyed cages beside the twisted steel skeleton of wires and track. The sunny juicy vine will rot on decaying hillsides, rice will dry in the withered earth, potatoes will freeze in the unploughed land and cows will stick their death-still legs into the air like overturned chairs. In the fields beside rusted ploughs the corn will be flattened like a beaten army. Then the last human creature, with mangled entrails and infected lungs, will wander around, unanswered and lonely, under the poisonous glowing sun, among the immense mass graves and devastated cities. The last human creature, withered, mad, cursing, accusing - and the terrible accusation: WHY? will die unheard on the plains, drift through the ruins, seep into the rubble of churches, fall into pools of blood, unheard, unanswered, the last animal scream of the last human animal - All this will happen tomorrow, tomorrow, perhaps, perhaps even tonight, perhaps tonight, if - if - You do not say NO.
Wolfgang Borchert
The boat entered the Harbour. The wide, bright city crowded up against the water, but drew back from its very edge; Ruth saw green parklands full of trees with white flocks of parrots bursting out of them. The parrots surprised Ruth, she imagined Sydney to be more like England than Fiji.
Fiona McFarlane (Art Appreciation)
Anchoring the country's southwest is Finland's former capital, Turku. This striking seafaring city stretches along the broad Aurajoki from its Gothic cathedral to its medieval castle and vibrant harbour. Turku challenges Helsinki's cultural pre-eminence with cutting-edge galleries, museums and restaurants, and music festivals that electrify the summer air.
Lonely Planet Finland
Don't laugh, it's people like her who make this lousy world a place worth visiting.' 'Whores?' 'No. We're all whores, sooner or later. I mean good-hearted people. And don't look at me like that. Weddings turn me to jelly.' We remained there embracing that special silence, gazing at the reflections on the water. After a while dawn tinged the sky with amber, and Barcelona woke up. We heard the distant bells from the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, just emerging from the mist on the other side of the harbour. 'Do you think Carax is still there, somewhere in the city?' I asked. 'Ask me another question.' 'Do you have the rings?' Fermin smiled. 'Come on, let's go. They're waiting for us, Daniel. Life is waiting for us.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1))
The Germans evacuated Naples on October 1, 1943. During an Allied raid the previous September, hundreds of citizens had walked away and begun living in the caves outside the city. The Germans in their retreat bombed the entrance to the caves, forcing the citizens to stay underground. A typhus epidemic broke out. In the harbour scuttled ships were freshly mined underwater.
Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)
A fine statue of a naked Theseus stands proudly today in Athens' central place of assembly, the city's hub, Syntagma Square. Even today he is a focus of Athenian identity and pride. The ship he brought back from his adventures in the Labyrinth of Crete remained moored in the harbour at Piraeus, a visitor attraction right up to the days of historical ancient Athens, the time of Socrates and Aristotle. Its continuous presence there for such a long time caused the Ship of Theseus to become a subject of intriguing philosophical speculation. Over hundreds of years, its rigging, its planks, its hull, deck, keel, prow, stern and all its timbers had been replaced so that not one atom of the original remained. Could one call it the same ship? Am I the same person I was fifty years ago? Every molecule and cell of my body has been replaced many times over.
Stephen Fry (Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #2))
One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad—into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum—I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus. Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.
Logan Pearsall Smith (All trivia: Trivia, More trivia, Afterthoughts, Last words)
Finally, rocking the whole harbour and carrying to every city windows; besetting kitchens with dinner on the stove, and shoddy hotel bedrooms where sheets are never changed, and desks waiting for children to come home, and schools and tennis courts and graveyards; plunging everything into a moment of grief and ruthlessly tearing even the hearts of the uninvolved, the Rakuyo's horn screamed out one last enormous farewell. Trailing white smoke, she sailed straight out to sea.
Yukio Mishima (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea)
A statue of Arturo Prat, hero of the Chilean Navy, surveyed it all. From under his statue I look up onto those fragrant wooded hills. The shanty houses blur into a pastiche of colour, yellows and reds, cobalt and purple. The washing lines strung across the stairways and hung from balconies echo the ships' flags fluttering in the harbour. This is a city of the muses. For poets, painters and composers. This is the artists' enclave. This is Venice and Florence waiting to be explored, and I dream it still.
Brian Keenan (Between Extremes)
Drugs flow as effortlessly through the harbour as through los esteros, but the government and the DEA view drug trafficking as more of a hazard to society when it moves through the poor area, with its dirty waters and seeming chaos, than when it has to do with corporate boardrooms and the main harbour. And for the FARC, it is becoming easier and easier to convince the city’s Afro-Colombian majority that the focus of the war on drugs is not primarily on the flow of drugs, but on what kind of people are involved in it.
Magnus Linton (Cocaína: A Book on Those Who Make It)
He had panicked. Tessier cursed his own stupidity. He should have remained in the column where he would have been protected. Instead, he saw an enemy coming for him like a revenant rising from a dark tomb, and had run first instead of thinking. Except this was no longer a French stronghold. The forts had all been captured and surrendered and the glorious revolutionary soldiers had been defeated. If the supply ships had made it through the blockade, Vaubois might still have been able to defend the city, but with no food, limited ammunition and disease rampant, defeat was inevitable. Tessier remembered the gut-wrenching escape from Fort Dominance where villagers spat at him and threw rocks. One man had brought out a pistol and the ball had slapped the air as it passed his face. Another man had chased him with an ancient boar spear and Tessier, exhausted from the fight, had jumped into the water. He had nearly drowned in that cold grey sea, only just managing to cling to a rock whilst the enemy searched the shoreline. The British warship was anchored outside the village, and although Tessier could see men on-board, no one had spotted him. Hours passed by. Then, when he considered it was clear, he swam ashore to hide in the malodorous marshland outside Mġarr. His body shivered violently and his skin was blue and wrinkled like withered fruit, but in the night-dark light he lived. He had crept to a fishing boat, donned a salt-stained boat cloak and rowed out to Malta's monochrome coastline. He had somehow managed to escape capture by abandoning the boat to swim into the harbour. From there it had been easy to climb the city walls and to safety. He had written his account of the marines ambush, the fort’s surrender and his opinion of Chasse, to Vaubois. Tessier wanted Gamble cashiered and Vaubois promised to take his complaint to the senior British officer when he was in a position to. Weeks went past. Months. A burning hunger for revenge changed to a desire for provisions. And until today, Tessier reflected that he would never see Gamble again. Sunlight twinkled on the water, dazzling like a million diamonds scattered across its surface. Tessier loaded his pistol in the shadows where the air was still and cool. He had two of them, a knife and a sword, and, although starving and crippled with stomach cramps, he would fight as he had always done so: with everything he had.
David Cook (Heart of Oak (The Soldier Chronicles, #2))
Yes, I'm the one who washes the plates and glasses They call me an easy woman When they give me a penny I still have to say thank you Here I am, in ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel Today, you don't know who I am Today, you don't know who I am   But one evening, one beautiful evening A big commotion People running along the shore Saying: "Look who's coming!" And me, I'll smile for the first time They'll say: "You, you're smiling now?"   A big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will enter the harbour!   I'll always be washing The glasses and plates I'll always be an "easy woman" When they give me a penny I'll always say thank you I'll keep my ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel And tomorrow, tomorrow like today You'll never know who I am!   But one evening, that beautiful evening for which I live Look how the cannons Wake up and turn For the first time, I'll burst out laughing "What, brat, you have the heart to laugh?"   That big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will bombard the harbour!   Then the sailors will come to shore More than a hundred, they'll mark with a cross of blood Every house, every door And it's before me that will be brought Enchained, imploring, mutilated and bloodied Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen!   Then the one I'm waiting for will appear, he'll say to me: "What is it that you want from all these people I'm killing?" And I'll sweetly reply: "Kill them all! For each head that falls I'll clap my hands, here we go! And that big ship, Far from the city where everything will be dead Will carry me towards life!
Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera)
For pure, focused devastation, however, probably the most intense earthquake in recorded history was one that struck–and essentially shook to pieces–Lisbon, Portugal, on All Saints Day (1 November), 1755. Just before ten in the morning, the city was hit by a sudden sideways lurch now estimated at magnitude 9.0 and shaken ferociously for seven full minutes. When at last the motion ceased, survivors enjoyed just three minutes of calm before a second shock came, only slightly less severe than the first. A third and final shock followed. The convulsive force was so great that the water rushed out of the city’s harbour and returned in a wave over 15 metres high, adding to the destruction. At the end of it all, sixty thousand people were dead7 and virtually every building for miles reduced to rubble. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, for comparison, measured an estimated 7.8 on the Richter scale and lasted less than thirty seconds.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
I am of opinion that if the names of contributors were to be inscribed as benefactors for all time, many foreigners would be induced to contribute, and possibly not a few states, in their desire to obtain the right of inscription; indeed I anticipate that some kings, tyrants, and satraps will display a keen desire to share in such a favour. [...] Were such a capital once furnished, it would be a magnificent plan to build lodging-houses for the benefit of shipmasters in the neighbourhood of the harbours, in addition to those which exist; and again, on the same principle, suitable places of meeting for merchants, for the purposes of buying and selling; and thirdly, public lodging-houses for persons visiting the city. Again, supposing dwelling-houses and stores for vending goods were fitted up for retail dealers in Piraeus and the city, they would at once be an ornament to the state and a fertile source of revenue. Also it seems to me it would be a good thing to try and see if, on the principle on which at present the state possesses public warships, it would not be possible to secure public merchant vessels, to be let out on the security of guarantors just like any other public property. If the plan were found feasible this public merchant navy would be a large source of extra revenue.
Xenophon (On Revenues)
The first projectile hit the sea wall of Gaza City's little harbour just after four o'clock.
Anonymous
Something killed them. Long ago. I don’t know exactly what. Some great cataclysm of the earth, that buried whole cities in a matter of days. It sank the coast, drowning harbour towns, and changed the courses of rivers. It wiped out the dragons, and I think it killed the Elderlings as well.
Robin Hobb (The Golden Fool (Tawny Man, #2))
DURING those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he thought very little about death; it was the past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself. But he had an intellectual curiosity about dying; about the changes that took place in a man’s beliefs and scale of values. More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself. This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature. And he noticed that he judged conduct differently now; his own and that of others. The mistakes of his life seemed unimportant; accidents that had occurred en route, like the shipwreck in Galveston harbour, or the runaway in which he was hurt when he was first on his way to New Mexico in search of his Bishopric. He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life—some part of which they knew nothing.
Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop)
Another famous town planning concept, the Finger Plan for Copenhagen, was based on a metaphor sand shown by a diagram, of a great hand resting over that city. Since 1947, the great hand has guided Copenhagen’s development. The merchant’s harbour, after which the city was named, sits in the palm of the guiding hand. Fingers point ways to new development. Power lines, telecom lines, and rapid transit lines follow the bones, arteries, veins and nerves of the fingers. Between those fingers we find the green lands of Denmark. Copenhagen was made into a garden city but the hand itself, of urban development, was grey.
Tom Turner (City as Landscape: A Post Post-Modern View of Design and Planning)
bridge into mainland China. It was a pleasing message of ‘business as usual’ smartly tailored to the merchant princes of the Mandarin Oriental. Few would have predicted such Sino-British ‘harmony’ (a favoured Beijing phrase) when Hong Kong was handed back to China on 30 June 1997, after the ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories came to an end. Then, it was all tears and angst, pride and regret. At the stroke of midnight the Union Jack was lowered to the strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, the Hong Kong police ripped the royal insignia from their uniforms, and Red Army troops poured over the border. Britain’s last governor, former Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten, recorded the final, colonial swansong in all its lachrymose glory: its ‘kilted pipers and massed bands, drenching rain, cheering crowds, a banquet for the mighty and the not so mighty, a goose-stepping Chinese honour guard, a president and a prince’. Steaming out of Victoria Harbour, as the Royal Marines played ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and
Tristram Hunt (Ten Cities that Made an Empire)
The end of the line. Her Majesty’s Ship the Royal Yacht Britannia sails at Hong Kong harbour, 23 June 1997. The ship, which would become the floating base for Prince Charles, arrived a
Tristram Hunt (Ten Cities that Made an Empire)
We are the heirs and propagators of Paganism. Happy is he who for the sake of Paganism bears the burden of persecution with firm hope. Who else have civilised the world and built cities if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbours and the rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not the famous men amongst the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all of this. They have discovered the art of healing the body, they have also made known the art of healing the soul; they have filled the earth with settled forms of government and with wisdom which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable. Thabbit Ibn Qurra
Tim Freke (The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs)
BLESSING FOR SOUND I thank you, for the smallest sound, for the way my ears open even before my eyes, as if to remember the way everything began with an original, vibrant, note, and I thank you for this everyday original music, always being rehearsed, always being played, always being remembered as something new and arriving, a tram line below in the city street, gull cries, or a ship’s horn in the distant harbour, so that in waking I hear voices even where there is no voice and invitations where there is no invitation so that I can wake with you by the ocean, in summer or in the deepest seemingly quietest winter, and be with you so that I can hear you even with my eyes closed, even with my heart closed, even before I fully wake.
David Whyte (The Bell and the Blackbird)
But these fictions all live on as a projection of the white city itself whose pearly skies are broken in spring only by the white stalks of the minarets and the flocks of pigeons turning in clouds of silver and amethyst; whose veridian and black marble harbour-water reflects the snouts of foreign men-of-war turning through their slow arcs, depicting the prevailing wind; or swallowing their own inky reflections, touching and overlapping like the very tongues and sects and races over which they keep their uneasy patrol: symbolizing the western consciousness whose power is exemplified in steel — those sullen preaching guns against the yellow metal of the lake and the town which breaks open at sunset like a rose.
Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet)
The little plantations at Weymouth, Hull, and Mount Wollaston, although within the limits of Boston Bay, nevertheless do not concern us here so much as the solitary men who had made homes for themselves upon the land now actually part of the modern city. On an island in the harbour was settled David Thomson, "Gent.," an attorney for Gorges, with his family. Thomson died in 1628, leaving to his family his island and to the island his name, which it has borne ever since.
Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston)
The city was in ruins. It had merely been months since its fall and it already looked like a century year old abandoned settlement. Steel skyscrapers and buildings once covered in suspended organic gardens and fountains were riddled with black poisonous vines. Fountains which once harboured blue waters were soiled with rotten bodies, bones and toxic moss. The streets were a cemetery of vehicles and skeletons, a graveyard of metal and bone.
Myosotis (Alchemy of Light and Shadow (Tenebrarum Dominus Book 1))
Charles Jardine Don, could invite an audience at Williamstown to gaze across the harbour at a city of nearly 100,000 inhabitants: Look at yonder city, illuminated by its magic lamps, its windows glittering with wealth, a city with palaces worthy of Kings and temples worthy of gods which labour has placed it in a short space of 1/4 of a century.
Jeff Sparrow (Radical Melbourne: A Secret History)
Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.
B.H. Panhuyzen (A Tidy Armageddon)
The brig Henrietta having made Sandy Hook a little before the dinner hour – and having passed the Narrows about three o’clock – and then crawling to and fro, in a series of tacks infinitesimal enough to rival the calculus, across the grey sheet of the harbour of New-York – until it seemed to Mr Smith, dancing from foot to foot upon deck, that the small mound of the city waiting there would hover ahead in the November gloom in perpetuity, never growing closer, to the smirk of Greek Zeno – and the day being advanced to dusk by the time Henrietta at last lay anchored off Tietjes Slip, with the veritable gables of the city’s veritable houses divided from him only by one hundred foot of water – and the dusk moreover being as cold and damp and dim as November can afford, as if all the world were a quarto of grey paper dampened by drizzle until in danger of crumbling imminently to pap: – all this being true, the master of the brig pressed upon him the virtue of sleeping this one further night aboard, and pursuing his shore business in the morning. (He meaning by the offer to signal his esteem, having found Mr Smith a pleasant companion during the slow weeks of the crossing.) But Smith would not have it. Smith,
Francis Spufford (Golden Hill)
We are the heirs and propagators of Paganism ... Happy is he who, for the sake of Paganism, bears the burdens of persecution with firm hope. Who else have civilized the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbours and the rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To who else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not to the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the Earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.   THABIT IBN QURRA OF HARRAN, NINTH-CENTURY SAGE   Paganism
Sarah Owen (Paganism: A Beginners Guide to Paganism)
Yes, I'm the one who washes the plates and glasses They call me an easy woman When they give me a penny I still have to say thank you Here I am, in ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel Today, you don't know who I am Today, you don't know who I am But one evening, one beautiful evening A big commotion People running along the shore Saying: "Look who's coming!" And me, I'll smile for the first time They'll say: "You, you're smiling now?" A big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will enter the harbour! I'll always be washing The glasses and plates I'll always be an "easy woman" When they give me a penny I'll always say thank you I'll keep my ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel And tomorrow, tomorrow like today You'll never know who I am! But one evening, that beautiful evening for which I live Look how the cannons Wake up and turn For the first time, I'll burst out laughing "What, brat, you have the heart to laugh?" That big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will bombard the harbour! Then the sailors will come to sure More than a hundred, they'll mark with a cross of blood Every house, every door And it's before me that will be brought Enchained, imploring, mutilated and bloodied Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Then the one I'm waiting for will appear, he'll say to me: "What is it that you want from all these people I'm killing?" And I'll sweetly reply: "Kill them all! For each head that falls I'll clap my hands, here we go! And that big ship, Far from the city where everything will be dead Will carry me towards life!
Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera)
In the days of his health and strength, Owen would have confidently refuted this picture of hopelessness, but he was tired and ill. His room now remained unheated most of the time and he was racked with coughs and ominous chest pains. In the long, miserable hours when sleep would not come, he found his eyes turning to that mouldy stain upon the wall, and he began to harbour dark thoughts. What was all this talk of the soul anyway? It could not be weighed or measured; die surgeon never discovered it. In any case it could not grant insight into stock market prices, could create no visible wealth. Indeed, there were brilliant people with titles like 'professor', people whose name trailed endless letters, who even after the most rigorous deliberations, most elegant applications of logic, doubted that such a thing as the soul existed at all. And after all, was not The City full of Smugsbys who possessed no discernible soul, yet lived after their fashion? The Great Mystery was nothing to them. They did not seek the Great Answer; they were not aware that there had ever been a Great Question! What business had he, a starving wretch, in seeking to nurture through his writings an invisible, odourless, weightless abstraction of dubious commercial value, when the very process merely drew attention away from the 'real' business of getting on? "The White Road
Ron Weighell (The White Road)
Banalata Sen Jibananda Das. Translated from the original Bengali by Amitabha Mukerjee A thousand years I have walked these paths, From the harbour at Malacca in the dark of night To the straits of Ceylon at glimmer of dawn. Much have I travelled - The grey world of Ashoka-Bimbisara, Further yet, The dark city of Vidharbha; Around me life foams its stormy breath. Weary of soul, I found a moment's respite in her presence - She: Banalata Sen of Natore. Her hair the ancient darkness of Vidisha, Face a sculpture from Sravasthi. A sailor in distant oceans, rudderless, lost, When hoves into view Island of grass through fronds of cinnamon, A green relief So she felt to me. In the darkness she spoke - "All these years, where had you been?" Her eyebrows arched like the soaring wings of a bird - She: Banalata Sen of Natore. With the sound of dewdrops, Comes evening. The sunset fringe of gold on the eagle's wing Melts into the night And the glow of fireflies. Birds return to nest - The shop of life Shuttered for the day. Left behind in the darkness Face to face - Only she: Banalata Sen of Natore. Original translation 11/90
Jibananda Das
shyness is the wall that prevents us from reading the fantasies secretly harboured by every human being.
Bakhtiyar Ali (I Stared at the Night of the City)