"When people talk about New York City, they usually talk about the size of it: the height of the buildings and the endless rivers of people flowing in narrow channels between them, the way I used to have to squeeze through the Piles before the Piles were vanquished. But what really strikes me is the sound—a constant hum of traffic and footsteps and phones ringing and kids squealing and someone, always, cursing at someone else."
Lauren Oliver, Broken Things
"Undeniably the globe's other place, its virtual second home, is New York. It's not just because Manhattan looks so memorable, or that it was the gateway for so much immigration. It is the first city of the electric age. We know it because it's been in our living room, kitchen and bedroom all our lives. New York is the greatest, most enduring, leading-man, heart-throb location of the screen. New York is the stage of our collective dramas."
A.A. Gill, The Golden Door
"I am still in New York, but the city I lived in then is not the city I inhabit now. Money remains ascendant, but its glow has spread across the borough of Manhattan. The faded signs, tattered awnings, peeling posters, and filthy bricks that gave the streets of my old Upper West Side neighborhood a generally jumbled and bleary look have disappeared. When I find myself in the old haunts now, my eyes are met with the tightened outlines of bourgeois improvement."
Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future
