Burn, with Athens and with Rome, A sacred city of the mind.

-Campbell, (Ignatius) Roy Dunnachie
  'Toledo,  July1936'.

   Underall theroofs ofthis distracted City isthenodus of a drama, not untragical, crowding towards solution.

-Carlyle,Thomas
  History of the French Revolution, vol.1, bk.5, ch.6.

New places you will not find, you will not find another sea The city will follow you.

-Kava¤  fis
  'The Town' (translated by E Keeley and P Sherrard).

Provided that the City of London remains, as it is at present, the clearing-house of the world, any other nation may be its workshop.

-Chamberlain,Joseph
  Speech at the Guildhall,19  Jan.

A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.

-Chandler, Raymond
  Of Los  Angeles. The Little Sister, ch.26.

The city is old, out of step with the century, but age only seems to have quickened its elements† Relics from the past continually pierce the present. Some dream of love survives the sandstone apartment houses.

-Cheever,JohnWilliam
  Of Boston. Letter to Elizabeth  Ames.

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

-Colton, Charles Caleb
  Lacon, vol.1, no.334.

God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.

-Cowley, Abraham
  Essays, in Verse and Prose,'The Garden'.

   The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upwards into hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel edges, leaningly strode upwards into firm, hard, snowy sunlight; the noises of America nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men and which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride firmly into immortal sunlight†

-cummings, e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings
  The Enormous Room, ch.13, closing words.

   who knows if the moon's a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the skyöfilled with pretty people?

-cummings, e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings
  'Seven Poems, VII'. David Niven used the phrase for his autobiography, The Moon's a Balloon (1975).

Avery fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together† In a word,'tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.

-Defoe, Daniel
^7  Of Glasgow.  A  Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, letter12.

   New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To thinkof 'living'there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live'at Xanadu.

-Didion,Joan
  'Goodbye To  All That', collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

All the ills of mankind spring from belonging to a race, a nation, a city, a group of some kind. The ideal would be to belong to none, and to care for allöbut who is capable of that?

-Dudek, Louis
Collected in Notebooks1960^1994 (1994).

Forasmuch as there isgreat noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid, we command and forbid on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.

-Edward II
  Royal proclamation, banning football from the streets of London.

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  The Waste Land, pt.1,'The Burial of the Dead'.

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.

-Gibbon, Edward
Memoirs of My Life (published1796), ch.6, note. Variations of the lines can be found in the various drafts of Gibbon's autobiography and in the last lines of the Decline and Fall:'It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public' (vol.6, ch.71).

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts† A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.Lines of light ranged inthenon- space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

-Gibson,William Ford
  Neuromancer. This is the first recorded use of the term 'cyberspace'.

Glasgow, the sort of industrial city where most people live nowadays but nobody imagines living.

-Gray, AlasdairJames
Lanark, bk.3, ch.11.

How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!

-Hawthorne, Nathaniel
  The Marble Faun, ch.12.

Paris is a beast of a city to be inöto those who cannot getoutof it.Rousseausaidwell, that allthetimehewasin it, he was only trying how he should leave it† The continual panic inwhichthe passenger iskept, thealarm and the escape from it, the anger and the laughter at it, must haveaneffectonthe Parisian character, and tend to make it the whiffling, skittish, snappish, volatile, inconsequential, unmeaning thing it is.

-Hazlitt,William
  Notes on a Journey through France and Italy (published 1856).