quotations about New York
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
THOMAS WOLFE
The Web and the Rock
The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. All dwellers in cities must dwell with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
E. B. WHITE
"Here Is New York", Holiday
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
I love autumn in New York City: The yellows, the browns, and the rust -- and that's just the tap water.... Here in New York City, the leaves turn -- and run.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, September 7, 2011
From my room, I could lie across my bed and watch the cars rush along Central Park West. In a hurry to get someplace. Everyone in New York is in a hurry. You see businessmen walking fast, their heads bowed, the cuffs of their pants flapping hard against their ankles. They don't look at anyone. Once I followed this man, walking so close behind him I could have been his daughter--but he never even looked over and noticed me. For two blocks I walked like that beside him. It made me sad for him--that he could walk through this world without looking left or right.
JACQUELINE WOODSON
If You Come Softly
You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are bailed hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?
O. HENRY
"A Tempered Wind", The Gentle Grafter
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
AYN RAND
The Virtue of Selfishness
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists.
EDMUND WHITE
City Boy
New York is one endless plank sidewalk.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
My own favorite thing about New York: It is Possibility City. Nowhere else do you have as much of a sense when you get up in the morning that your life could be completely different by evening, merely according to whether you turn right or left when you get to a particular street corner.
JAY MOLISHEVER
New York Magazine, November 10, 1980
A New York doctor has finished a five year study on what smells have the biggest effect on New Yorkers. The smell New Yorkers like the most: vanilla. The smell New Yorkers like the least: New Jersey.
JAY LENO
The Tonight Show, March 30, 2010
My first memory of New York is of being carried out of the uptown IRT at Times Square, unconscious, by two policemen. It was rush hour; I was exhausted from riding back and forth, trying to figure out which train stopped at Morningside Heights, when suddenly, a great surging crowd charged at me, pinning me against a closing door. I passed out. Blame my physical weakness, my provincial naiveté--my inability to understand the unique folkways of subterranean New York. I had lived too long in Paris, where crowds are controlled during rush hour by automatic gates, where maps outside and inside subway stops, as well as overhead and on the wall in each car, clearly designate stations and transfer points.
BARBARA ROSE
"Why No One Is Making New York Understandable", New York Magazine, September 25, 1972
Naturally, one carries to New York a craving to see some of the many things that our world-metropolis is supposed to possess. One sees the things, true enough. But of the environment, almost nothing has been said. Honesty would compel anybody, not self-hypnotized, to affirm a disappointment with which that of a blind man, accidentally taken into a movie show by his attendant, will not compare. His is merely negative disappointment. New York furnishes a positive one. We are compelled to see the show.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
In New York freedom looks like too many choices.
U2
"New York"
What does the future hold for the legendary metropolis, a gateway for immigrants and strivers, a magnet for builders and dealers, and a muse for artists and dreamers? What will happen to once-unique streets that are awash in generic stores, apartment boxes, and garish signs and billboards? Or to the legendary neighborhoods--Little Italy, Hell's Kitchen, Harlem, the Lower East Side--that are now simply real estate markets smoothed over with cute monikers, all equally safe for investment?
JERILOU HAMMETT & KINGSLEY HAMMETT
preface, The Suburbanization of New York