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Took me a while to find it but finally...finally, I did. I thought it was from Dostoyevsky but it's from Tolstoy's Resurrection. I knew it was the first page of the novel. It has stuck with me all these years.

"THOUGH hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together : paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds and beasts, filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal : still spring was spring, even in the town.

The sun shone warm, the air was balmy, the grass, where it did not get scraped away, revived and sprang up everywhere, between the paving-stones as well as on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards."