Tuesday, May 10, 2011

First Birthday

Empire State Building

We're turning one today! To celebrate, besides eating cake, we''ve selected ten of my favorite quotes... so far -- but stay with us for the wittiest, funniest and craziest things said about the greatest city in the world:

"The first month in New York for a newcomer has this certain amazing magic about it that is indescribable. Incandescent lucidity.  However long you stay in New York, you pretty much spent the rest of your time there trying to recapture that feeling. Chasing the Manhattan dragon."
Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

"Even the vegetables in New York are better. It’s not just the vegetables, of course. I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance."
Nora Ephron, Heartburn

"New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it -- once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough."
John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

"New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying."
Cornell Woolrich, Manhattan Noir 2

"New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars."
Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

"New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu."
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit."
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again."
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

 "New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill them, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."
E.B. White, Here is New York

What's your favorite? 

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