There is a restlessness in the city that I have grown to love—it’s like a swaying cat’s tail.

No matter where you are in the city, the time of year or weather, the sky at dusk will stop you in your tracks.

The way the sunset sometimes Tiepolos the clouds.

It’s sun-kissed, industrial, god-fearing, gas-guzzling, all of it built on a harrowing history of lynch mobs and expropriation.

If there is one constant about this place, it is this, that the people on the move (here) all rely on a different set of lies to proceed with their truth(s).

Architectural gems crumble on street corners, shrouded in grit till they’re decreed too ugly to save.

London, which seems all sprawl and braggadocio, is at the same time self-contained and fiercely defended.

I don’t live (t)here, but it lives in me still.

I love this city against my own better judgment.

I’m always a bit shattered by Athens.

Dig anywhere in the city and you collide with history.

Its name, “the city of thousands,” is synonymous with multitude.

The desert is the shoulder of the city.

Oxford is one hidden city layered over another.

Naples is the city of a hundred cities, of a hundred satellites all orbiting the unique, massive planet that is memory.

The city has devoured itself over and over again.

Athens is about instant decisions, constant change, boldness and confusion and nerve.

London is a self-enclosed world that contains all worlds.

Usually there is no time to be moody, only the slap and the dash and the drill and the dig, you dig?

Even if Salerno is blessed with sunshine, many things happen in the twilight.

Car horns suddenly transformed into instruments of emotion, sirens of mourning.

Something is always about to happen.

Old Mughal monuments stand at ease with glass-and-steel office towers.

For me, there is no Algeria, only Annaba, where the Barbary coast yawns out.

The Paris I grew to love isn’t gone, but right now it is shutting down.

Returning to Lisbon means savoring another delectable local delicacy: the mouthwatering Portuguese language with its varied assortment of vowels.

There is a permanent solace in the knowledge that you can’t be the weirdest person in this city.

There is another life that unfolds in this low-lying area at the foot of the seven hills.

Returning to Rome makes the blood rush in unpredictable ways.

There’s no forgetting that we’re on an island at the bottom of the Pacific, looking up, heading into the morning while much of the world is still making its way through the day we just left behind.

Toledo is a city marked with scratches, indentations, ashes of other cities, shadows, fugitive trails, clouds of smoke, dust, and slamming doors.

Is it possible to ever fully outgrow the place that first left its mark on you? The town, city, or village where you lived for the first fifteen years of your life?

Amman consumes me when I’m there and it can feel like an entire world. It demands so much attention even as it grumbles about its own frustrations.

The moment you think that you know Abidjan, the city escapes your embrace.

The place that keeps having me back, its moonless nights, its raucous urban sea, anonymous and also memory-crammed, people- and ghost-filled.

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.—Italo Calvino, Invisible…

Torino wears an elegant three-piece suit of the most beautiful fabric, but it’s frayed at the cuffs, missing some buttons.

There’s nowhere that I don’t feel like an outsider. It’s always been that way . . . For me that’s something joyful.

Passion lives in the realization, especially among Calgary’s creative class, that everything is permitted here.

From certain vantage points you can see the bones of the old city. Graying old buildings. Brickworks. Row houses stacked up on the hill.

Bangalore was a small, sleepy cantonment town that woke up one day to find it had become a booming metropolis.

Nothing exists outside Bombay. From the moment you get off the plane, you know you have entered a room full of mirrors: everything is self-referential.

Even in the Nablus of my mind I remain outside, peering in at windows, opening stale cupboards, looking for abandoned objects from the past.

Tripoli is my father’s birthplace, and it always evokes existential questions about my identity: can I be of a place but not from it?

Outside San José, the world exists, but it is a city that, despite its smallness, tries to contain you.

What comes to us of places we have not seen is not what that place actually is. This important fact is ignored more and more.

Those who I call my own (mi gente) draw some thing from each other: some light, some power I see but have few words for. And they build when they remember.

San Juan is a city full of life with a unique perspective on how to weather the growing storms of our moment.

Brighton is often called the London-suburb-by-the-sea. It’s a raffish and open city.

Winter is a rite of passage. There is a special stillness that can possess you for better or for worse.

The human psyche is also New York psyche: vertical, horizontal, additive, oscillating between prophetic vision and madness.

It certainly feels true that all roads lead to Rome and, to that end, Rome is forever a city of outsiders. In one fashion or another, it absorbs us all. But those same famous roads, built centuries ago, also lead away from Rome.

People always talk about whether the place one returns to is the same as or different than the place one left. To be able to return to a place implies an inevitable second or third departure. Gradually, one is also invited to reflect on departure and…

I take Melbourne everywhere with me these days: her good manners, brisk moods, screaming weather, boldness, outright brassiness, and her whispering words. They are now helix to my soul.

Although Beirut is not my city of origin, it is the city of my heart.