City Called Arcadia

Famous quotes containing the words city, called and/or arcadia:

    “Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
    in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
    Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
    He is building a city, a city of flesh.
    He’s an industrialist.”
    —Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

    “It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions.... Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features.”
    —Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

    “To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
    —Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)