Thursday, June 30, 2016

My Speed

"Sky" mosaic by Yoko Ono

"New York is at my speed. It is a 24-hours-a-day city, it's going on around you all the time, so much that you almost stop noticing it. But it's all there if you want it."
John Lennon, The Beatles: Off The Record 2

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Vital Appendage


"From above, Manhattan is just a lonely arm, squirting and bending from the big body of Brooklyn. It is not until you are inside it that you see it is the vital appendage, the hand that squeezes at the rest of the world, the muscle where everything that's anything is made."
Molly Prentiss, Tuesday Nights in 1980

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Crazy

East Village

"Plenty of crazy people in New York. There are so many crazy people here, I think it's like one out of every one person is completely out of their mind."
Louis C.K., Comedy Central

Monday, June 27, 2016

High School Chick

Baruch College Campus High School

"New York is like that high school chick who was once kind of cool and nerdy but just discovered she's cute—she still has a soul in there, even if she's spending all her time right now at the mall flirting with dumb bros."
Rebecca Fishbein, Gothamist

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Life

Cornell Tech


"New York is a place where one finds life at its most highly accomplished levels of mind, art, and technique, and where life is confronted, daily, at its most elemental, as a matter of sheer survival."
Thomas Bender, New York Intellect

Saturday, June 25, 2016

California

Coney Island

"One of the essential conditions of living in New York City is thinking wistfully about living in California. It's the opposite coast, therefore presumed to be the opposite in every other way."
Rumaan Alam, Rich and Pretty

Friday, June 24, 2016

Place of Extremes

Madison Square Park

"It was a glorious day outside—not yet the full summer warmth, but balmy enough for people to bare their arms and legs without the fear of goose pimples. Those windows of time were so short in New York City, which was in all ways a place of extremes."
Emma Straub, Modern Lovers

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Mourning New York

Alphabet City

"We always just miss New York. I watched it with this neighborhood. When I moved here everyone was mourning the SoHo of the seventies, Tribeca of the eighties, and already ringing the death knell for the East Village. Now people romanticize the Alphabet City of Jonathan Larson. We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared."
Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Unrooted

Williamsburg

"New York is different. It is a city where the unrooted can take root. You do not need to have been born in New York, you do not, I believe, even need to be an American, to feel yourself a New Yorker."
Alec Waugh, quoted in Governing New York City

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Engine


"I regard New York City as the most amazing city in the world. No other comes close. It is an incredible, inexhaustible engine. Everywhere you look, you see everything humanity has to offer, from the beautiful and good to the horrible, pathetic and wretched, sometimes all at one intersection."
Henry Rollins, LA Weekly

Monday, June 20, 2016

Ahead of History



 "Boston is all history and recollection; New York is ahead of one. Sympathetic spirits are a rarity elsewhere. Here there is a whole community of the arts, an endlessly stimulating fellowship . . . at times too stimulating. No one is too great for New York, and yet I grant there is something frightening about it."
Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Wonderfully Miserable


"I noticed during my time in New York that many of the people I met there had a habit of describing how miserable they were, then arguing that they couldn't leave the city because it was so wonderful."
Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Signs

Dumbo

"If I've learned anything from parking in New York, it's that signs are confusing and easily misread."
Dana (Analeigh Tipton), Manhattan Love Story



Friday, June 17, 2016

A Block Away from Heaven


"I'm from that city full of yellow cabs and skyscrapers
It's hard to get a start in these parts without paper
Homie, I grew up in hell, a block away from heaven."
50 Cent, Big Rich Town




Thursday, June 16, 2016

Bigger Fish to Fry

Stuyvesant Cove Park

"People in New York are really cool. They're like: 'I loved your movie.' That's it. They've got bigger fish to fry."
Emily Blunt, The Guardian

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Dense


"New York is very dense. It's dense with everything. It's dense with visual information. I'm talking about Manhattan—every place you look, there's something to see. There are stores, but it's never just one level of stores. It's two or three levels of stores. The first floor might be books, the second floor might be a place that does nails, and the third floor might be a place that stores furs. And then there's the architecture—it's one era of buildings slapped up right next to another with no space in between. That's one of the things that I adore about New York City. There are not even words for how much I adore that. Everything smashed up against everything else."
Roz Chast, 6sqft

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Trembling

Sheepshead Bay subway station

"New York is a trembling city. It quivers most when subway, bus, elevated railroad and motor traffic picks up in morning and evening rush hours. Heavy milk trains make its rocky underpinning jig before dawn. Earthquakes clear across the world can titillate it."
Meyer Berger, Meyer Berger's New York


Monday, June 13, 2016

Bedlam


"There is a certain synergy to the bedlam that is New York, a certain organizational level that can only be experienced, never described. This is a city where you hit the ground runningor you get hit back."
Peter Greenberg, Travel Detective Flight Crew Confidential

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Own Universe

Hayden Planetarium

"New Yorkers walk around in their own universe. They're not self-conscious. They're not aware that they're visible. They maintain their space. They’re just doing their thing."
Diane Lane, The New York Times

Saturday, June 11, 2016

The Company of the City

East River waterfront


"New York is having everything to chose from and never having enough time to do anything. It's being surrounded by people and feeling lonely. It's also finding out you don't need other people's company, you just need the city."
Laura Steiner, The Huffington Post

Friday, June 10, 2016

Asleep


"The world knew New York as the city that never sleeps, but it seemed to Michael that there was an hour each morning, maybe less than an hour, maybe only fifteen minutes, that were so singularly still and silent that those minutes stretched out until they felt like an hour, when there were no cars on the avenue, no horns, no dog walkers, no one hosing down the sidewalk, no one sweeping, no heels clicking, no brakes squealing, no nine-to-fivers weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic, because there was no pedestrian traffic, not yet."
Mary Beth Keane, The Walking People

Thursday, June 9, 2016

New York Standards


"Where you'd be just an eccentric in another town, here, you're one of millions. No matter how peculiar you are, you're still normal by New York standards."
Milton Glaser, The Village Voice



Wednesday, June 8, 2016

As Good as It Gets

NYC ferry and Williamsburg


"New York may be terrible, but it's as good as it gets."
Chuck Klosterman, The New York Times

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Fascinating


"New York is the most fascinating city in the world, and the most essentially cosmopolitan."
Richard Burleigh Kimball, Virginia Randall: Or, Today in New York

Monday, June 6, 2016

Glamorous Town


"New York was the glamorous town that you only see now in old movies and on Broadway stages. The sky was lit up with dancing neon signs. It was safe to walk out in the streets."
Art Buchwald: Leaving Home

Sunday, June 5, 2016

No Bomb


"I knew that I'd lived in New York too long when, a few years ago, I was on a subway going downtown, and it stopped at 14th Street. At the station, the doors opened, and the conductor announced that there was a bomb on board and we should evacuate immediately. Nobody moved. We just looked at each other, 'Do you see a bomb?' 'I don't see a bomb.' 'There's no bomb.' 'I've only got two stops -- let's go for it.'"
Lewis Black, Comedy Central

Saturday, June 4, 2016

Two New Yorks


"When I first came to New York, I was in my early twenties, discovering a city I had fantasized over since my teens. I saw it with multicolored glasses, to say the least. Also, I rarely got up before noon and hit the sack again around four or five in the morning. Two New Yorks, really. These days, my buzz can be obtained by just walking, preferably early in the morning, as I am a seriously early riser. The signature of the city changes shape and is fleshed out as more and more people commit to the street. A magical transfer of power from the architectural to the human."
David Bowie, Vulture

Friday, June 3, 2016

Statue of Liberty

Statue of Liberty

"There could hardly be a finer site for the Statue of Liberty, and it is not easy in New York to escape her matronly benediction. Like the headmaster's wife at the beginning of term, she greets you inexorably as you sail in through the harbor, and keeps her eye on you throughout."
Jan Morris, The Great Port

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Heaven

Manhattan skyline and Williamsburg bridge

"I imagine when we get to heaven, it will look just like Manhattan—confusing, threatening and as seductive as a hot fudge sundae."
Vera Jane Cook, Dancing Backward in Paradise

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Blown Fuses

ConEdison substation


"New York is wired for its own special kind of electricity and most people don't have the right kind of emotional plugs. The result is lots of minds with blown fuses."
Daniel Jeffreys, America's Back Porch