Suburbia Quotes

“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, Anna Dressed in Blood

“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, Dangerous Laughter

“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, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the hair, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to grandparents of growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.

What happens to them when the commercial ends?”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the same street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels.”
― Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism

“Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“How young I seem; Iamexceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.”
― Randall Jarell

“With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.”
― William Golding

“That was the ballad of suburbia: give me loud to drown out the silence.”
― Stephanie Kuehnert, Ballads of Suburbia

“He hated the blue platter his mother served from, and the salt and pepper shakers, which were glass with red tops, and he hated the silverware designed in flowers, some pieces scratched almost beyond recognition. He even hated the round table and the succession of tablecloths, one pale blue with yellow leaves, one white with red and orange squares. He hated the uncomfortable chairs, particularly his own, where he sat squirming, and he hated his family and the way they talked.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

“Besides shopping at garage sales, I love hosting garage sales. Every year my mom and I dig through our houses and find a bunch of crap (I mean really terrific stuff) to sell so we can earn some money so we can go back out and buy some more crap (I mean really terrific stuff) that we’ll use for a bit and then turn around and garage-sale in a couple of years. It’s the circle of life suburban style.”
― Jen Mann, People I Want to Punch in the Throat: Competitive Crafters, Drop-Off Despots, and Other Suburban Scourges

“The activities of automobile manufacturers, commercial real estate developers, and the federal government have been far more important in determining patterns of transportation than consumer choice.”
― Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000

“Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might - just might - be the monstrous Child of Night.”
― Jack Williamson, Darker Than You Think

“As he pushed the shopping cart down the narrow aisles [of Whole Foods]he noted two distinct types: the wild-haird bohemians who worked there, and the middle-aged yuppies who shopped there. Organic food was healthy, yes? So how to explain the unsightly appearance of the patrons--their sallow complexions, their thin and frizzled hair, their shuffling gaits. Many looked like recent victims of accident or disease, limping and wheezing, loading their carts with every sort of vitamin known to the natural world. In Benjamin's opinion they would do better getting a steak and some frozen peas at the Stop & Shop down the street. How much granola and broccoli could one tolerate? Hitler was a vegetarian, he'd learned on the History Channel, and a compulsive farter.”
― Dan Pope, Housebreaking

“Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value”
― Ralph Nader

“LA is very different from New York. New York is a huge, dense metropolis. LA is a bunch of small towns all running into each other.

New York is the city that never sleeps. Los Angeles is an endless sea of suburbs.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, New York to Los Angeles Roadtrip

“... Women's impulse to change her own rhythms in the face of an environment constructed to retain her as guardian of the suburban hearth.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“Yet the tranquil image of suburbias of the past remains, and continues to influence us, as do traditional concepts of femininity....”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The New Suburban Woman

“I see that you’re about to leave, Rick. I just wanted to make sure that you didn’t miss the Thighmaster over there? Well, what about the Tiddy Bear or the Talking TP; the Slap Chop or the Hawaii Chair? How about a Booty Pop for your wife to save that failing marriage… Just so you know, that immaculately manicured lawn in front of your house isn’t enough to stifle the sound of fighting coming from your window late at night. Surely the one thing missing from your life is an Eggstractor. Think about how much happier you and your wife would be if you didn’t have to peel all those eggs. I’m only trying to save your marriage, Rick.”
― Simon Brass, Lamentations on the Nothingness of Being

“As I do my best to haggle down the prices further, Mr. Williams responds with a pained expression on his face, “Oh my, you can’t seriously believe that I could let you have that box set of The Big Bang Theory for anything less than $30. You must be dreaming… you must simply be dreaming.

It’s all a big dream really, a nightmarish spectacle that feels completely at home in a society infatuated with the idea of attaining profit at all costs. I could never figure out to write in that unmistakable Kafkaesque style, and then I realized that narrating an average day in suburbia would suffice.”
― Simon Brass, Lamentations on the Nothingness of Being

“In Southern California it didn't make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere. And when finally you got hungry and went to the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald's hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that and so forth, back to before you were born, and in addition bad people—liars—said it was made out of turkey gizzards anyhow.

They had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in theonposition. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale "How the Sea Became Salt." Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“Submerged Suburbia by Stewart Stafford

Fell out of bed, dragging my soul,
Looked out the old goldfish bowl,
To see suburbia was underwater,
And I was engaged to Neptune’s daughter.

There were buses like whales,
Driven by aquatic snails,
And jellyfish squatters,
Chased by octopus coppers.

Crab and lobster schoolkids,
Scurried by making online bids,
As a serial killer shark,
Prowled for surfers before dark.

Someone let the water out,
And it all went down the spout,
Flopping fish still tarried,
But I got out of getting married.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Suburbia Knocks by Stewart Stafford

Covert dawn's surreptitious light,
A magpie sentry's warning song,
Swooping, scanning silent streets,
Cackling danger all night long.

Metallic cross of crucified clothes,
A choir of colours in the breeze,
Waterboarded by lashing rain,
Made them suffer incrementally.

One knock for no, two knocks for yes,
One and a half for uncertainty,
Three knocks for drinks and company,
The rite of suburban courtesy.

37 years ago, down at number 37,
Came the first and last royal visit,
Dizzying anticipation from first light,
Fading fairytale in a curtsying gibbet.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A church leader studied the history of architecture in New Zealand and found that before World War II, homes were built with verandas, where people would sit in the evenings with their family to greet passersby and invite them to stop and chat.”
― Lee Strobel, The Case for Heaven: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for Life After Death - Library Edition

“The curious culture of the modern suburb will believe anything it is told in the papers about the wickedness of the Pope, or the martyrdom of the King of the Cannibal Islands, and, in the excitement of these topics, never knows what is happening next door. In this case, however, the two forms of interest actually coincided in a coincidence of thrilling intensity. Their own suburb had actually been mentioned in their favourite newspaper. It seemed to them like a new proof of their own existence when they saw the name in print. It was almost as if they had been unconscious and invisible before; and now they were as real as the King of the Cannibal Islands.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown

“The place where a genius is likely to be born is a suburban area.”
― Lana M. Rochel, Looking For Your Tribe: Intellectual Poems

“The best scenario for a genius to be born is a suburban area, not choc-a-bloc a place, for wits prefer quietness.”
― Lana M. Rochel, Looking For Your Tribe: Intellectual Poems

“You were thinking about how suburbs are perfect cradles for dreaming: they practically beg you to imagine another life, one lived at a burning voltage. The dreaming hidden in this place - murmuring beneath the comfort of the uniform gardens in their perfect rows, the mowed lawns, each driveway that bit too small for the two large cars you couldn't have become what you are if you hadn't always been from this.”
― Colin Walsh, Kala

“You were thinking about how suburbs are perfect cradles for dreaming: they practically beg you to imagine another life, one lived at a burning voltage. The dreaming hidden in this place — murmuring beneath the comfort of the uniform gardens in their perfect rows, the mowed lawns, each driveway that bit too small for the two large cars — you couldn't have become what you are if you hadn't always been from this.”
― Colin Walsh, Kala

“pissing on photos, we wake
parched
in parallel realities
i still end up drowning
in visions

he settles for the horror;
hostage
to the oddity of normal-
comfy spot mirage,

as he makes the bed daily
so he can lie in it and
be secret sad boy; he settles
to sleepwalk with fantasy,
slitting the throat of actual
possibility, begging
for a hand job to get through the day,
making friends with locked doors
and collectors of cookie cutters”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Altered States of the Unflinching Souls