#metro

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world. ↗

— Henry James

#city-life #life #london #metropolis #life

Contrary to what you have been told, metrosexuality is not about flip-flops and facials, ‘man-bags’ or ‘manscara’. Or about men becoming ‘girlie’ or ‘gay’. It’s about men becoming everything. To themselves. In much the way that women have been for some time. It’s the end of the sexual division of bathroom and bedroom labour. It’s the end of sexuality as we’ve known it. ↗

— Mark Simpson

#men #metrosexual #metrosexuality #men

At the dawn of the second decade of the Twenty First Century, masculinity has been rendered so self-conscious in our mediated, mirrored world that even ‘regular guys’ are apparently just a fashion fad – this season’s accessory. ↗

— Mark Simpson

#men #metrosexual #metrosexy #retrosexual #men

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging. ↗

— J. G. Ballard

#areas #because #came #emerging #england

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time. ↗

— John Berger

#chosen #emigration #experience #forced #frontiers

That's an economic development program in the metropolitan area. If they don't see that, and you don't get these things done, then you're competing with Texas and California and Atlanta; then you really have problems. ↗

— Richard M. Daley

#atlanta #california #competing #development #done

After 9/11, the businesses in my district and throughout the New York metropolitan area saw firsthand the result of a lack of availability of terrorism insurance. ↗

— Steve Israel

#area #availability #businesses #district #firsthand

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds. ↗

— P.D. James

#city-life #london #metropolis #soho #food

At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum. ↗

— Joseph Lancaster

#attend #calculation #children #cost #inhabiting

My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school. ↗

— Douglass North

#boy #company #completed #even #father