His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;

T. S. Eliot / Preludes IV

John Atkinson Grimshaw #BookWormSat

"Modern cities, pounding the senses with information, become invisible. The psyche sleeps at some secret level when the mind is overstimulated, a sleep that is death-like."

A.A. Dun, "The Uninhabitable City".

Image: Mark L.

#BookWormSat @bookwormsat.bsky.social

The spider was a city, gray and observant and jealous once in a while, though deep inside it didn't really care at all. But the black widow cannot stop weaving, and the city cannot stop weaving.
Alike in temperament, they feast on their spawn.
- Harlan Ellison, Web of
the City

#bookwormsat

"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters."

(Charles Baudelaire "Paris Spleen")

🎨 Jean Béraud

#BookwormSat

"Once, earlier, I passed this route and from a rail station, maybe Berlin, looked out on empty streets and dark houses. Except one where a childs face looked back, like the prisoner of a plague city."

Johannes Jörgensen: "Glimpses of München" (1901)
#BookwormSat

🎨 Edward Gorey

"Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard - jukebox-winking, rock'n'roll moaning: America at night fusing its dark cities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness."
- The start of 'City Of Night' by John Rechy
#BookWormSat

"A ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories on its face & the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards & slip around at night through deserted office buildings... A real ghost. Not something out of books."

'Smoke Ghost' by Fritz Leiber #BookwormSat

MENENIUS:
This is the way to kindle, not to quench.
To unbuild the city, and to lay all flat.
SICINIUS:
What is the city but the people?
PLEBEIANS:
True, the people are the city.

Shakespeare , CORIOLANUS, 3.1
#BookWormSat
#CityLife #September11
#Unbroken
#SpiritofNewYork
#FirstResponders

"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost."

📘 Paul Auster, City of Glass
🖼️ J.-M. Basquiat, New York

#BookWormSat #Urban

"Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the street, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think."

📘 Paul Auster, City of Glass
🖼️ Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled

#BookWormSat #Urban

Book Cover of the Day:
#BookWormSat

"By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere."

📘 Paul Auster, City of Glass
🖼️ Georgia O'Keeffe, My New Yorks

#BookWormSat #Urban

"New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it."

📘 Paul Auster, City of Glass
🖼️ Georgia O'Keeffe, Radiator Building

#BookWormSat #Urban

Dublin made me and no little town
With the country closing in on its streets
The cattle walking proudly on its pavements The jobbers, the gombeenmen and the cheats
Devouring the fair-day between them
A public-house to half a hundred men - Donagh Mc Donagh-Dublin Made Me. #BookWormSat

"This is the lesson: great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn."

"Only the bodegas stand open, sentinels of the City That Never Sleeps and Occasionally Needs Milk at Two A. M."

- N. K. Jemisin, "The City We Became"
#BookWormSat

‘The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.’ ~ MacNeice #BookWormSat

‘And meanwhile the city will go on, regardless
Of any new arrival, trains like prayers
Radiating from stations haughty as cathedrals…’ ~ MacNeice
@racheldeering.bsky.social here for a #BookWormSat of urban life in literature.