City and Everyday Life

Towered cities please us then,

This is Red Hook, not Sicily … This is the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world.

When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.

Not in the clamour of the crowded street,

The cares that infest the day

Not many sounds in life … exceed in interest a knock at the door.

Ah! que la vie est quotidienne.

To one who has been long in city pent,

Dear, dirty Dublin.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

Fleet-street has a very animated appearance; but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing-Cross.

A hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.

When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.

Towery city and branchy between towers;

In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca what were you doing down by the watermelons?

But at my back from time to time I hear

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent godless people:

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the

Let us go then, you and I,