Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.

Hog butcher for the world,

Tool maker, stacker of wheat,

Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of big shoulders.

-Carl Sandburg, "Chicago," 1916

It's a 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes; it's dark and we're wearing sun glasses.
- - - Blues Brothers

I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.

- - - Fred Allen, Much Ado About Me, 1956

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

-Nelson Algren

It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.

- - - Mark Twain

I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago. . . . I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.
- - - Rudyard Kipling,

Chicago is a city of contradictions, of private visions haphazardly overlaid and linked together. If the city was unhappy with itself yesterday-and invariably it was-it will reinvent itself today.
- - - Pat Colander

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.

-H. L. Mencken