“For those with restless, curious minds, fascinated by layer upon layer of things, flavours, tastes and customs, which we will never fully be able to understand, Tokyo is deliciously unknowable. I’m sure I could spend the rest of my life there, learn the language, and still die happily ignorant.”
— Anthony Bourdain
“If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.”
—Orhan Pamuk
Arriving in a new city often feels like meeting someone for the first time. The smells, sights, and surroundings all elicit familiar yet faraway emotions. Cities have been romanticised by the creative realm for as long as anyone can remember. The dichotomy of belonging and feeling like an outsider has never been explained better than Olivia Laing when she said, "You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people." And then there are others who left their homes only to find their hearts arrested by a new city. A city isn't much different from a person–there is the beginning of innocence, the scars of history, and the romance of ages. They crumble and rise again, much like you and me. In this compilation, we explore different cities around the world and how they have played muse to multiple literary and public figures.
“In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.”
— George Eliot
“I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
— Ernest Hemingway
New York
“I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.”
— Truman Capote
Kolkata
“Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.”
— Amit Chaudhuri
London
“The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“One day I asked my soul: what is Delhi? She replied: The world is the body and Delhi is its soul.”
— Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
“The Berliners are unfriendly and reckless, gruff, and bossy. Berlin is odious, noisy, dirty, and grey; roadworks and congested streets wherever you go—but I’m sorry for everyone who does not stay here.”
— Anneliese Bödecker