Sourced

• It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street. The collar of my coat appeared to stiffen, and the brim of my hat to expand, beneath its Quakerly influence.
  • Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842), ch. VII

Unsourced

• Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.
  • W. C. Fields in Vanity Fair about a proposed epitaph.

• Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it. … I saw small steamboats, with their signs up - 'For Wissahickon and Manayunk 25 cents.' Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon…
  • Mark Twain, while working for The Philadelphia Inquirer (online source)

• Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.
  • Robert Anton Wilson