Locomotive

Roosevelt Island Tram

"The inhabitants of New York are the most locomotive people on the face of the earth."
James Boardman, America, and the Americans

A New York Minute

Mercer Street

"In a hot New York minute. Immediately. Equates to a nanosecond, or that infinitesimal blink of time in New York after the traffic light turns green and before the ol' boy behind you honks his horn. Or you could define it like this: the imperceptibly brief moment between when you open your mouth to speak and a New Yorker interrupts you."
Charles Harrington Elster, What in the Word? Wordplay, Word Lore, and Answers to Your Peskiest Questions about Language (Harvest Original)

The Pace of the City

Empire State Building

"New York is known for being fast. You can adapt or lose out."
Donald Trump, Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life

Where the Glutton is a Gourmand

Grand Central Oyster Bar

"New York is my sort of city, a place where the glutton is seen as gourmand, the troughing pig as discerning auteur. The moment I'm in under that tunnel or cross over that bridge, I feel that all is well in the world."
Tom Parker Bowles, The Year of Eating Dangerously

Magical Place

Empire State Building

"It's a cliché, but there's some truth to it: New York is a magical place."
Carol Alt, Model, Incorporated

Windows of New York

Fifth Avenue

"New York is a wonderful place to live because there is so much to look at. When I was a little girl, I would spend hours looking out the window of our apartment. I always thought that windows were a place to dream."
Tomie Arai, Just Like Me: Stories and Self-Portraits by Fourteen Artists

Manhattan Lights

Eventi Plaza

"I like the noise of the city, and concrete below my feet, and I don't miss seeing the stars at night because the lights of Manhattan create their own universe, and eight million people are more interesting than eight million trees."
Nelson DeMille, Wild Fire

Elusive God

Marble Collegiate Church and Empire State Building

"I live in New York where God can seem very elusive. Unlike in New Mexico, there is no easy looking to nature for the assurance of God, the Great Creator. New York is filled with monuments to man and his accomplishment."
Julia Cameron, Faith and Will

Dysfunctional Relationship

Meatpacking District

"Living in New York is like being involved in a dysfunctional relationship. As I used to say when I lived there — you can love it, but it will never love you."
Alan Epstein, Anything Is Possible: Real-Life Tales and Universal Lessons

New York Dreams

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir

"New York has always been greater than the sum of its dreams."
Gillen D'Arcy Wood, Hosack's Folly: A Novel of Old New York

Incomparable Town

Flatiron Building

"I have never seen a modern town comparable to New York. The color of the stone and lightness of the air would put vitality into a corpse."
Margot Asquith, My Impressions of America

Vast and Startling

Midtown West

"New York was vast, New York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite backward generations that accounted for anything."
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (Penguin Classics)

Painting New York

Belvedere Castle

"One can't paint New York as it is but as it is felt."
Georgia O'Keefe, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'KeeffeFull Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe

Two Places

Broadway

"There were only two places on the map: Manhattan and everywhere else."
Cristina Alger, The Darlings

Dream City

Met Life Tower

"New York is truly the dream city,—city of the towers near God, city of hopes and visions, of spires seeking in the windy air loveliness and perfection."
Langston Hughes, The Life of Langston Hughes

The Anti-Ark

"Love" by Robert Indiana

"Such if the whirl of the city, so great is centrifugal force, that it would take superhuman strength to envisage living as a couple and sharing someone else's life in New York. Only tribes, gangs, mafia families, secret societies and perverse communities can survive, not couples. This is the anti-Ark."
Jean Baudrillard, America (New Edition)

Walking on Mirrors

Canal Street

"New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests — undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else — a foolish crowd walking on mirrors."
Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens

A Castle

Belvedere Castle

"New York is like a castle. You make trips to the outer world."
Oscar Hijuelos, New York Magazine

Multiple Person

"That is the great advantage of New York, why it is the city. One can be a multiple person there: ten different people with ten different sets of friends, none overlapping."
Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Intimidating City

West 111th St. People's Garden

"Manhattan can be an intimidating city that makes a newcomer, especially one on a small budget, feel like a bewildered and vulnerable bird kicked fresh from the warm nest."
Celerie Kemble, Celerie Kemble: To Your Taste: Creating Modern Rooms with a Traditional Twist

An Artificial Environment

Central Park

"New York is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in which the terrain's primeval contours have long since been obliterated and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations."
David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

How to Be Happy

Rockefeller Center

"There are only two ways of being happy in New York: being very young and very rich."
Michael Craig-Martin, quoted in True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World

White Plume

Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal

"It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village—the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up."
E.B. White, Here is New York

A Work of Art

Staten Island Ferry and Lower Manhattan

"The Manhattan skyline is like looking at a great work of art; when you're in the presence of a great work, it is hard to give your attention to anything else."
Maurice A. Hargraves, A More Perfect Union: Socialization to Realization

New York Living

Spring Street

"New York isn't comfortable. It isn't sane. It isn't fit to live in. Living here is just a habit, a bad habit, but one you don't want to break."
Henry Collins Brown, New York of To-day

Falling in Love

Bryant Park

"Being in New York is like falling in love over and over again."
Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), Glee: Season Two

Exciting and Upsetting

East Coast Memorial

"New York is exciting and upsetting. So are the Alps; so is a tempest; so is a battle. New York is not beautiful, and if it stimulates our practical activities, it wounds our sense of happiness."
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity

Medieval City

The Cherub Gate at Trinity Church

"New York is the world's most medieval city; the narrow streets, buildings meeting at the top, squalor, paranoid nightwalkers, the skill required to steer yourself around the Scylla and Charybdis on every block, a whole life of drowning flashbacks encountered on every corner waiting for the light to change."
Lloyd Khan, Shelter