Oblivious of the Cosmos

Eventi Plaza

"At night the white glow that fizzes upward from the city—an inverted electric Niagara—obscures the stars, and except for the Planetarium's windowless mimicry, New York is oblivious of the cosmos."
Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary

Everyone Has an Opinion

Times Square McDonald's

"Everybody knows New York City. You don't have to live here to have an opinion about it -- you don't even have to visit."
Jonathan Scheff, New York City Icons: 50 Classic Slices of the Big Apple

The Real America

Times Square

"Whatever Americans may say about New York, it is the real America: here you have all the heights of American technology and all the smoky delirium of its oppressive, shining life."
Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip

A Place to Hide from Anything

Claremont Arch

"New York was the kind of place where you could hide from anything. Possibly even yourself."
Kinky Friedman, A Case of Lone Star

First Base

Riverside Park

"50K does not get you to first base in the Big Apple."
Budd Fox (Charlie Sheen), Wall Street

Always New

The New Museum

"There is a sense in which New York is always new; in the sense that it is always being renewed. A stranger might well say that the chief industry of the citizens consists of destroying their city; but he soon realises that they always start it all over again with undiminished energy and hope."
Gilberth Keith Chesterton, What I Saw in America

Thanksgiving in New York

"Thanksgiving in New York is a wonderful time. It's a time for giving of yourself, for thinking of your fellow man. A time when the unforgiving city becomes a little kinder."
Ted Mosby (Bob Saget), How I Met Your Mother: Season One

Capable of Going Mad

Cooper Square

"There are times when it seems the whole city of New York is capable of going mad, of exploding into riot."
Gay Talese, Fame and Obscurity

The Strangest City

Spring Street

"New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century  sweatshops and tenements, the streets pot-holed and buckling while right over there, around the corner, is a Chanel boutique. We go shopping amid the rubble,  like the world's richest, best-dressed refugees."
Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall: A Novel

Cutthroat City

Lafayette St.

"The city's almost clean now. They said Guiliani cleaned everything up, but someone will always find a new way to cut your throat."
Ray Fiske (Zeljko Ivanek), Damages: The Complete First Season

Common Ground

Fifth Avenue

"I think of New York, of its tremendous sense of energy, and it seems to me that it's generated by all those hundreds of thousands of people walking, and walking at great speed, sometimes for twenty, for thirty blocks — people whirl into a place, the door is swung open, other people are leaving, and the sense is one of circulation; perhaps that's the reason everyone talks to each other so easily there — because we all share that great, common ground: New York City's streets."
Kristin McCloy, Hollywood Savage: A Novel

New York is Full

"New York is full. Go Home."
Nick Mamatas, 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once

Treasure Isle

"Step right up to Treasure Isle
Ev'ry inch of it, a sky-high mile
Fairytale land
Only in New York."
Dick Scanlan (lyrics) "Only in New York," Thoroughly Modern Millie

New York Was His Town

"Chapter One. 'He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.'  Oh, I love this. 'New York was his town, and it always would be.'"
Isaac Davis (Woody Allen), Manhattan

What Runs Beneath

Bryant Park

"In New York, even in winter, the whole place is open and filled with possibility. It's the energy here, I say, the way it runs beneath the surface of everything."

Maddie Dawson, The Stuff That Never Happened: A Novel

Much More than New York

Central Park

"New York meant much more than New York. It meant sophistication, taste, freedom, and accomplishment. It meant you had “made it” somehow, creatively, and that your life, a New Yorker's life, was chief among your creations."
Julia Cameron, The Sound of Paper

Manhattan Real Estate

100 Eleventh Avenue

"This is Manhattan real estate. There are no rules ―  like check-in at an Italian sex party."
 Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski), 30 Rock: Season Four

New York Harbor

South Street Seaport

"This is New York City, I now understand: the crowded, dirty harbor and the smells, mostly, or maybe I'm just hungry -- diesel oil, exhaust, exhaust and exhaustion, sweat."
Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women: A Novel

A Circle of Woe

"I boarded a train, the number six, packed with disparate, desperate New Yorkers, underscoring the sad fact that although people can break up, places cannot. New York was doomed to be locked together into one unharmonious circle of woe."
Arthur Nersesian, Manhattan Loverboy

Delia Robbia Sky

Union Square

 "From the very first second that I got there I loved New York. It's the most beautiful place. And the biggest! And the most mixed up! And the sky is the brightest, clearest blue — Delia Robbia sky, I heard some one call it once."
Sophie Kerr,  The Blue Envelope: A Novel / by Sophie Kerr ... ; Frontispiece by Frances Rogers

The Idea of New York

Empire State Building

"When he first arrived in New York, he thought he could achieve whatever he wanted. The city wasn't a place as much as an idea, he thinks -- escape, freedom, such potential. Now it seems as if all he's been trying to do is hold on to the place when it's the idea that's gone."
Adam Langer, Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat

Drive and Urgency

Grand St. subway station

"God, he loved New York. He loved the drive, the sense of urgency. He liked rubbing shoulders with the people around him, as the subway rocketed and clattered its way down to the heart of the world's financial center."
Tom Perkins, Sex and the Single Zillionaire

Polished Silver

Riverside South

"The city of New York gleamed like polished silver."
Lorenzo Carcaterra, Chasers: A Novel

Everyone is an Immigrant

Roosevelt Avenue

"It's one of the things I love best about New York: everyone came from somewhere else."
Isabelle (Julie Christie), New York, I Love You

End-of-the-World Show

"I would never have believed that the New York marathon could move you to tears. It really is the end-of-the-world show. Can we speak of suffering freely entered into as we might speak of a stage of slavery freely entered into?"
Jean Baudrillard, America (New Edition)

Missing New York

Statue of Liberty

"I'm dying to feel that I'm living once more
I gotta get back to New York.
There's only one statue,
I know you'll agree.
The dame with the torch looking over the sea.
The smell of the Bronx is perfume to me.
I gotta get back to New York."
Lorenz Hart (lyrics), "I Gotta Get Back to New York", from the movie Hallelujah I'm a Bum

Low-Grade Depression

Fifth Avenue

"One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong."
Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

The First Time

Manhattan skyline seen from Secaucus, NJ

"Manhattan glittered ahead of him, an amazing sight for the first time in a life. Movies don't prepare a person for this reality any better than they do for the first flight in an airplane."
Joan Brady, Bleedout: A Novel