"The crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gaiety...to some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium is to the one addicted to the habit.
It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it.  Rather than be deprived of it, they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain and misery; they would not exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among a great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it."

From The Autobiography of am Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson

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