Best Quotes from Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson with Page Numbers

Darkness is misconceived as nothingness; rather it is a state of ‘intrinsic light’, within which a great deal of visual information may be discerned.

The eye, and its position, is the fulcrum on which the entire visible universe pivots.

Humanity has always looked for the dubious reassurance of auguries and, through wishful thinking and pareidolia, has continually found threats of danger and promises of treasure.

All great imaginary cities merge the matter-of-fact with the surreal.

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true / Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours.

The journey and the direction, rather than the destination, are key.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave... But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art.

The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

‘Nothing has really happened,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘until it has been recorded.’

Ruins are the best we can hope for. They are traces at least, marks on oblivion.

We may not be able to defeat death but we can hope temporarily to elude the second death, the one that erases evidence that we ever really existed to begin with.

The sun is power.

The curious town of Taghaza... was made entirely from rock salt…

The Egyptian hieroglyph for city also means ‘mother’.

‘Vitruvius insightfully described an assembly of early humans around a fire initially caused by lightning.’

This event literally disclosed a clearing in the forest: a political and public space whose main quality was to be a place for individuals to participate in political and cosmic order larger than themselves.

Yet even these miserable wretches had pride, and sought to justify the building of settlements by divine preordination.

It is telling that engravings of the god Inshushinak feature him with a supernatural tail and cloven hooves but also the crown and beard of an Elamite king.

Lineages were constructed, title deeds and family trees.

When God, endlessly disappointed, finally prepared to turn his back on the world forever, it happened that some of his angels disagreed with him and took the side of man.

Great crimes are disguised by belief, narrative and tradition.

No city, these stories confirm, is natural or inevitable. They are the results of lives and decisions and that which has been imagined into existence can be reimagined.

A true report of certaine wonderfull ouerflowings of Waters [...] destroying many thousands of men, women, and children.

The future will be old.

The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

All prophecies are intrinsically about the now.

The urge for the utopian is a valid one.

Utopia is simply an escape into a parallel world of fairness, justice and comfort.

The absence of this once-common state is an indication that we exist without realizing it in what once would have been sought after as an improbable utopia.

With cities, as with people, the condition of the bowels is all-important.

Objective truth was illegal if not unknowable.

What may save us is, in Orwell’s words, a dedication to ‘common decency’.

Experience seeps into setting and setting seeps into experience and both become memory.

"Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards." — Søren Kierkegaard

"The genius of Bellamy’s text is not what changes but what does not change, making it eternally relevant."

"You cannot step in the same city twice. It is not the same and neither are you."

"What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree."

"The narrator’s sight has changed. The scales have fallen from his eyes."

"A person who inhabits a utopia, even just mentally, is changed. Imagining the future changes the future."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw

"Human nature itself must have changed very much... Not at all, but the conditions of human life have changed, and with them the motives of human action."

"Everything changes eventually. In the film Dark City, buildings grow and contract like living organisms; an idea the director Alex Proyas had from watching sets of scale model cities be moved around on earlier films."

"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop." — Rumi

‘Most cities hide their mechanics, tubes and sewers underground or within walls.’

‘Slums remain not simply as a curse, but as a dumping ground, in the mode of Toxitown.’

‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.’

‘Too many corpses strew the paths of individualism and collectivism.’

‘Those are the terms and we largely accept them.’

‘Failure means anarchy. Success freedom.’

‘The character of the architectural forms and spaces which all people habitually encounter are powerful agencies in determining the nature of their thoughts, their emotions and their actions.’

‘For all his grandeur and flirting with autocratic malice, Ferriss is on the side of the ants – ‘the human being is the Principal’.

‘The city never sleeps and neither does its builder and patron saint.’

‘We need to rethink and reclaim space, or be claimed by it.’

‘All happy families are alike,’ Tolstoy claimed, ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ So too is it with cities.

The multiple ways of failing still invite singular moralistic explanations, proving we have never quite escaped the desire to appease gods with sacrifices.

Architecture aims at Eternity; Wren pointed out, and architecture fails.

Unless innovations are found, a host of metropolises will relocate underwater, others will be absorbed into swamps, forests, tundra.

The sense that the ruined cities were the cause and not the consequence of diabolical crimes gives credence to anti-cosmopolitan forces.

Even when damned by the self-righteous as a fallen decadent civilisation, there is still a pervading sense of sadness.

The feeling of lost greatness or lost futures is a curious one, combining the sense of the transitory in the Japanese term mono no aware and the feeling of yearning Portuguese sailors call Saudade.

Even if society has been largely lost, even if our languages have been forgotten and our cities utterly destroyed, if there are survivors they will sift through the wreckage, look upon the landscape and be drawn to placing stone upon stone once again.

The first death is the physical death. The second is when you’re forgotten about completely and, to all intents and purposes, cease to ever have existed at all.

The idea of cities will exist so long as there is a mind left to imagine them.