Shanghai Quotes

“Will: 'Singing the praises of our fair city? We treat you well here, don't we, James? I doubt I'd have that kind of luck in Shanghai. What do you call us there again?'
Jem: 'Yang guizi ... foreign devils.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“She doesn't need your money. Even a penniless fool like you can make her fall in love with you. That's just miracle.”
― Vann Chow, Shanghai Nobody

“He just lingers long enough to see his plane put to bed properly, then grabs a cab at the airport-gate. "The Settlement" and forgetting that he's not inland any more, that Shanghai's snappier than Chicago, "Chop-chop."

"Sure, Mike," grins the slant-eyed driver. "Hop in."

A change has come over the city since he went away, he can feel that the minute they hit the outskirts, clear the congested native sections, and cross the bridge into the Settlement. Shanghai is already tuning-up for its oncoming doom, without knowing it. A city dancing on the brink of the grave. There's an electric tension in the air, the place never seemed so gay, so hectic, as tonight; the roads opening off the Bund a welter of blinking, flashing neon lights, in ideographs and Latin letters alike, as far as the eye can see. Traffic hopelessly snarled at every crossing, cops piping on their whistles, packed sidewalks, the blare of saxophones coming from taxi-dance mills, and overhead the feverish oriental stars competing with inter-crossed searchlight beams from some warships or other on the Whang-poo. Just about the right town and the right night to have fifteen thousand bucks in, all at one time. ("Jane Brown's Body")”
― Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, "New York." You wouldn't know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, "You're gonna lose your gal." ("Jane Brown's Body")”
― Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“I barely took a moment to appreciate nature. Come to think of it, the
only time I did it was when I was so upset I wanted to commit suicide in the
Huang Pu river.”
― Vann Chow, Shanghai Nobody

“It doesn't take poison to make something lethal. Any substance in large quantities can kill. Something good in large quantities will kill too.”
― Chloe Gong, Foul Lady Fortune

“When the kids see how amazing one seed turning in to beautiful flower and transformation to a juicy red strawberries then We are saving our future, it is not a product anymore that they used to grab in the supermarket but it is magic of life and with urban farming we doing this. @ K11”
― Baris Gencel

“And now that I have been scammed once, I felt like it could not happen to me again.”
― Vann Chow, Shanghai Nobody

“This is Unique !! Shopping malls working with one side of our needs, material satisfaction but here @ K11 there is a huge effort and initiative to bring emotional needs of human, our spiritual satisfaction.
K11 doing this with bringing Art and Nature in to the material shopping experience. It is not only satisfying physical needs and material but also our soul. Art itself is biggest teacher and Nature is biggest artist.”
― Baris Gencel

“The girls here are so young. One of them twines her fingers into mine, her hand so small I could crush it. There are more of them in the ballroom, standing well outside the pools of light that demarcate the dancing from the sitting, the illusion from the reality.”
― Karen Kao, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle

“It feels like all we've been doing day after day is partying with Shanghai's Gossip Girl crowd.”
― Kevin Kwan, China Rich Girlfriend

“Come and see what the world looks like at the Shanghai Tower, Shanghai, China.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“It is June. I am in Shanghai and I am not tired. June in Shanghai is for cold bubble tea, for kissing, for three-yuan ice creams and misty rain mixing with sweat on skin.”
― Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai

“I wander back to class along Zhengsu Lu in the afternoon, my floral-print umbrella in one hand, an ice cream in the other. The air has that pre-lightning feel. It is June.”
― Nina Mingya Powles

“The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution.

Shanghai!”
― Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning