#suburb

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

#haunted #places #sinister #suburbia #life

Small town folk are so mannered towards sameness. City dwellers are so classy about Chinatown, Harlem, Greenwich Village. But suburbanites are the most tolerable of all: lacking either manners or culture, they just sprawl out in their four-bedroom, two child homes and close their doors to all the other four-bedroom, two-child homes. Suburbanites don’t abide, they abed, and we’re all abetter for it, since they don’t know how to say that they don’t have anything to say. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#humor #suburbs #funny

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

#suburbia #summer #dreams

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

#death #england #london #suburbia #death

I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#burglars #curtains #dull #friend #grew

Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the nation - especially in the suburbs. ↗

— Melissa Bean

#especially #identity #identity theft #nation #suburbs

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after. ↗

— Peter De Vries

#car #children #deliver #ever after #forever

The nation can no longer afford to continue policies that hasten the flight of persons to the distant suburbs. ↗

— Jane Byrne

#continue #distant #flight #hasten #longer

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. ↗

— Cyril Connolly

#breeding #class #crime #delirium #grounds

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis. ↗

— Quentin Crisp

#changing #contempt #eventually #expanding #find