Suburbia Quotes

Quotes tagged as "suburbia" Showing 1-28 of 28
Kendare Blake
“Over the course of my life I've been to lots of places. Shadowed places where things have gone wrong. Sinister places where things still are. I always hate the sunlit towns, full of newly built developments with double-car garages in shades of pale eggshell, surrounded by green lawns and dotted with laughing children. Those towns aren't any less haunted than the others. They're just better liars.”
Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood

Steven Millhauser
“After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.”
Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

J.G. Ballard
“From sandwich to summer school, they were the symbols of subservience and the enemies of freedom.”
J.G. Ballard, Millennium People

Alexander McCall Smith
“Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...”
Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

J.G. Ballard
J.G. Ballard, Millennium People

Geoff Nicholson
Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism

William Golding
William Golding

Don DeLillo
“The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the hair, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to grandparents of growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.

What happens to them when the commercial ends?”
Don DeLillo, White Noise

Neal Stephenson
“Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.”
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

Raquel Cepeda
“Paradise is a state of being, more than just the name of a suburb or a home.”
Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

Randall Jarrell
“How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.”
Randall Jarell

Stephanie Kuehnert
“That was the ballad of suburbia: give me loud to drown out the silence.”
Stephanie Kuehnert, Ballads of Suburbia

Dana Gioia
“O Suburbs of Despair
where nothing but the weather ever changes!”
Dana Gioia, Daily Horoscope: Poems

“LA is very different from New York. New York is a huge, dense metropolis. LA is a bunch of small towns all running into each other.

New York is the city that never sleeps. Los Angeles is an endless sea of suburbs.”
Oliver Markus Malloy, New York to Los Angeles Roadtrip

Jen Mann
“Besides shopping at garage sales, I love hosting garage sales. Every year my mom and I dig through our houses and find a bunch of crap (I mean really terrific stuff) to sell so we can earn some money so we can go back out and buy some more crap (I mean really terrific stuff) that we’ll use for a bit and then turn around and garage-sale in a couple of years. It’s the circle of life suburban style.”

“One thing he held against the bird force was the curse of knowing always which direction he was headed in, without the vaguest idea where he was going. He headed east this time, recalling as if it were yesterday every fifth or sixth mile of the road, where they hadn't torn it up, straightened it, bent it, laid it down again, and bordered it with regular houses planted eave-to-eave like an impenetrable, multicolored fence - soon a flag will wave from every antenna, we'll peek out at the savage world from a plaster fortress, nationwide.”
Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall

Dan Pope
“As he pushed the shopping cart down the narrow aisles [of Whole Foods]he noted two distinct types: the wild-haird bohemians who worked there, and the middle-aged yuppies who shopped there. Organic food was healthy, yes? So how to explain the unsightly appearance of the patrons--their sallow complexions, their thin and frizzled hair, their shuffling gaits. Many looked like recent victims of accident or disease, limping and wheezing, loading their carts with every sort of vitamin known to the natural world. In Benjamin's opinion they would do better getting a steak and some frozen peas at the Stop & Shop down the street. How much granola and broccoli could one tolerate? Hitler was a vegetarian, he'd learned on the History Channel, and a compulsive farter.”
Dan Pope, Housebreaking

Jack Williamson
“Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might - just might - be the monstrous Child of Night.”
Jack Williamson, Darker Than You Think

Shirley Jackson
“He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition. He even hated the round table and the succession of tablecloths, one pale blue with yellow leaves, one white with red and orange squares. He hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.”
Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Do you remember the suburbs and the plaintive flock of landscapes

The cypress trees projected their shadows under the moon

That night when as summer waned I listened

To a languorous bird forever wroth

And the eternal noise of a river wide and dark

(The Voyager)”
Pierre Albert-Birot, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader

Dolores Hayden
“The activities of automobile manufacturers, commercial real estate developers, and the federal government have been far more important in determining patterns of transportation than consumer choice.”

“If you really observe “suburbia,” it was created from fear or for lack of a better word, the conservative mindset terrified of anything original. Especially terrified of the individual. Thousands of years ago they called it Babylon.”
Chris Morgan (SON)

Nancy Rubin Stuart
“... Women's impulse to change her own rhythms in the face of an environment constructed to retain her as guardian of the suburban hearth.”
Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman: Beyond Myth and Motherhood

Nancy Rubin Stuart
“Yet the tranquil image of suburbias of the past remains, and continues to influence us, as do traditional concepts of femininity....”

Simon Brass
“I see that you’re about to leave, Rick. I just wanted to make sure that you didn’t miss the Thighmaster over there? Well, what about the Tiddy Bear or the Talking TP; the Slap Chop or the Hawaii Chair? How about a Booty Pop for your wife to save that failing marriage… Just so you know, that immaculately manicured lawn in front of your house isn’t enough to stifle the sound of fighting coming from your window late at night. Surely the one thing missing from your life is an Eggstractor. Think about how much happier you and your wife would be if you didn’t have to peel all those eggs. I’m only trying to save your marriage, Rick.”
Simon Brass, Lamentations on the Nothingness of Being

Simon Brass
“As I do my best to haggle down the prices further, Mr. Williams responds with a pained expression on his face, “Oh my, you can’t seriously believe that I could let you have that box set of The Big Bang Theory for anything less than $30. You must be dreaming… you must simply be dreaming.

It’s all a big dream really, a nightmarish spectacle that feels completely at home in a society infatuated with the idea of attaining profit at all costs. I could never figure out to write in that unmistakable Kafkaesque style, and then I realized that narrating an average day in suburbia would suffice.”
Simon Brass, Lamentations on the Nothingness of Being

Philip K. Dick

They had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale "How the Sea Became Salt." Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside.”
Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly