Suburbia Quotes

• Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

  Bill Vaughan

  Fun, Home, Names

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• Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do.

  Sloane Crosley

  Country, Real, Cities

  Sloane Crosley (2012). “I Was Told There'd Be Cake”, p.65, Portobello Books

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• I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.

  Beth Henley

  Mother, Play, Community Theatre

  "Expressing "The Misery and Confusion Truthfully": An Interview with Beth Henley". "American Drama" Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2005.

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• Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Running, Wind, Tourists

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• The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

  Eldridge Cleaver

  Dance, Book, Writing

  ELDRIDGE CLEAVER (1968). “SOUL ON ICE”

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• What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

  Harlan Coben

  Book, Writing, People

  8 Copy quote

• I'm really the candidate who has really lived his whole life in suburbia.

  Bob McDonnell

  Whole Life, Whole, Candidates

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• Those movies, Decline I and II and Suburbia, are dearly loved, but they never made any money. I didn't even have the rights for some of them.

  Penelope Spheeris

  Movie, Rights, Aggravation

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• Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care.

  Jimmy Buffett

  Ignorance, Empathy, Apathy

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• Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Yards, Three, Way

  Interview With Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org.

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• I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Special, Tragic, Things Happen

  Source: www.slate.com

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• With breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to look at and turning America into a prison house of the spirit. The affluent society, with relentless single-minded energy, is turning our cities, most of suburbia and most of our roadways into the most affluent slum on earth.

  Eric Sevareid

  Cities, America, House

  Eric Sevareid (1964). “This is Eric Sevareid”

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• People in suburbia see trees differently than foresters do. They cherish every one. It is useless to speak of the probability that a certain tree will die when the tree is in someone's backyard . . . . You are talking about a personal asset, a friend, a monument, not about board feet of lumber.

  Roger Swain

  Talking, Feet, People

  Roger B. Swain (1983). “Field days: journal of an itinerant biologist”, Macmillan Reference USA

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• Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Powerful, Thinking, Cynical

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• Suburbia is all about private ownership and not having to share, and it leads to a paranoid, defensive mindset. I know this, having grown up in Essex.

  Hari Kunzru

  Essex, Mindset, Ownership

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• I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.

  Sylvia Plath

  Real, Self, People

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.289, Anchor

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• I have always found the suburbs very beautiful – the light, the change of seasons and so on. I am not so interested in the political dimensions of these things. I didn’t have any witticisms to land on suburbia. I was really just interested in how beautiful it was. I felt it was like a dreamscape and once I understood that was how I needed to approach it the dream started to expand in unusual ways.

  Bill Henson

  Beautiful, Dream, Light

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• When they dumped all these people out of the insane asylums they didn't all go sleep in the street. Some of them moved into suburbia, and started writing postcards to the FCC.

  Frank Zappa

  Sleep, Writing, Fcc

  Source: afka.net

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• I grew up in the classic American-Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the world.

  Natalie Portman

  Mean, World, Different

  Jewish Chronicle Interview, July 6, 2007.

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• This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don't see anyone's privates.

  Lauren Oliver

  Tree, Encounters, Answers

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• [Suburbia] represents, after all, the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. We built it during our most affluent period of history, and in the decades to come we will be comparatively destitute collectively. In short, we will not have the resources to retrofit most of suburbia.

  James Howard Kunstler

  World, Affluent, Resources

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic.

  Dana Spiotta

  Long, Lazy, Afternoon

  Dana Spiotta (2006). “Eat the Document: A Novel”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• The fortunate and successful New Urbanists will be the ones who can find local infill projects in small towns and small cities associated with farming, water transport, (perhaps rail too) and water power. I do not believe personally that we will retrofit much of suburbia in the way many people wish we might. The capital won't be there, and I'm rather convinced that the population is headed down - though this will be a lagging effect, because even starving people have sex.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Sex, Believe, Successful

  Interview With Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org.

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• Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Ruins, Boards, Vinyl

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Believe, I Believe, Fixed

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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