Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Pub Lessons

Bar on Park Avenue South

"New York is an absolutely glorious city. It's a jewel ... brilliant! The people, the buildings! The food, the drink! Why Rory, I never saw so many pubs in me life. And every time I walked into a pub in New York I learned something new, don't you know."
Susan Turlish, Lafferty's Wake

Monday, May 30, 2016

Great Love


"Like any great love, it keeps you guessing
Like any real love, it's ever-changing
Like any true love, it drives you crazy
But you know you wouldn't change anything, anything, anything
Welcome to New York
It's been waitin' for you
Welcome to New York, welcome to New York."
Taylor Swift, Welcome to New York

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Eau de New York

Grand Army Plaza


"As the days heat up, the sewage stench on the north side of Forty-second Street just west of Sixth Avenue—Eau de Bank of America—ripens, and the ruts of horse shit along Central Park South begin to sing. At certain subway stops, the odor of rotting flesh returns, as though from a winter in Arizona, and all over town you can enjoy the blossoming of that chief attribute of New York: the smell of urine."
Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker


Saturday, May 28, 2016

Girls

Rose Hill



"Fact: Girls who are having a good sex thing stay in New York. The rest want to spend their summer vacations in Europe."
Gail Parent, Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York

Friday, May 27, 2016

New York Noises

Midtown Manhattan

"I loved any chance to drive through the filthy, bewildering streets of New York, see so many different types of people, marvel that so many noises could exist all at once—horns, sirens, human yells."
Lucy Grealy, Autography of a Face

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Contrast and Tension


"New York is a city of contrast and tension—wearing a diamond watch in the subway with a Luger in your pocket while reading the Wall Street Journal."
Gay Talese, New York Magazine

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Anthology


"New York is a sort of anthology of urban civilization. The song that any city sings she sings. All that anybody can seek for that can be housed in steel and cement is here, and with it, never lost in all the city's drabness, respect for the striving, combative beauty-loving spirit of man."
R. L. Duffus, Literature in America

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Okay

Gantry Plaza State Park


"The grit and the everyday challenges that New York brings taught me that I'm okay. I'm okay just being myself and that's what New York City does."
Prabal Gurung, The Observer

Monday, May 23, 2016

Dark City on the Hill

Manhattan skyline 

"New York City had long been the dark city on the hill for me, shadowy and ominous and perfect."
Moby, Porcelain

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Grubby Brooklyn


"Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan, as on Dean Street, on Bergen, on Pacific.  Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self."
Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Mecca

Midtown (Pixabay)

"New York is the mecca toward which the initiated and the aspiring look with awe and respect."
Edith Fletcher Hayter, Behind the Scenes in Fashion Merchandising

Friday, May 20, 2016

Flickering Skyline


"I miss being drunk in a cab and watching the flickering skyline zip past my window while I realize, I'm in fucking New York City."
Mira Ptacin, The Atlantic

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Diversity


"The thing I love about it is its diversity. I never knew there were so many ways to say, 'f**k you.'"
Ardal O'Hanlon, Comedy Central

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

New York in May



"I like New York in June, how about you? It is, of course, still May but I like New York in May too. In fact I like New York period."
Noël Coward, The Noël Coward Diaries

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Mad City


"New York is a mad city, an odd mixture of the most blatant vulgarity and the most surprising beauty in the buildings, and in the people of extraordinary callousness and great kindness."
Howard Ferguson, Letters of Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson





Monday, May 16, 2016

Agreement

Mott Street


"New Yorkers are regularly reminded, and not always in the kindest tones, that New York is not America. They just as regularly, and happily, agree."
Richard John Neuhaus, New York Glory

Sunday, May 15, 2016

New York Crime

Morningside Heights

"In New York it's a crime never to have done anything with your life."
Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Friday, May 13, 2016

Beyond Redemption


"The people who inhabit this city, or infest it rather, because it can't be a habitation, what of them? Do they redeem it? No! dear readers, they do not. They are so busy trying to redeem the mortgages that the landlords of New York have placed upon their souls that they have no personality or personality left to redeem the city. It is beyond redemption, so far as they are concerned."
William Henry McMasters, Originality and Other Essays

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Sense of Neighborhood

Tudor City

"So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back."
E.B. White, Here is New York

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Richness of Life


"America (or rather New York, which is something quite separate) is not the land of the unforeseen, but it is the land of the richness of life, of the fullness of every hour in the day, the country which gives you the sense of carrying out a huge amount of activity, even though in fact you achieve very little, the country where solitude is impossible."
Italo Calvino, Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Sixth Birthday

Joseph Barbaro / Wikimedia Commons

NY Daily Quote turns six today! Who knew people had so much to say about New York? To celebrate, here are our ten favorite quotes from the past year. We look forward to bringing you many more.

10. "While Paris gets to your heart, London to your mind, and Jerusalem to your soul, New York gets into your veins, a lifeline that becomes part of you more than you become part of it."
Uri Savir, America in Quotations

9. "As soon as I left Manhattan behind, the beneficent, regal creature forgot me. It tolerated me when I was a student of eighteen, it gave me my chance, it celebrated me when I made it, and it forgot me the second I drove over the Henry Hudson Bridge. You're always just a foster child in the city that never sleeps. The second you go, someone else takes your room."
Kristan Higgins, If You Only Knew

8. "New York is simply a marvel! It is hard to believe it was build by humans, it appears like magic."
Frida Kalho, Frida Kahlo

7. "The thing about New York is everything you love about it changes, and you just have to learn to love that too."
Adam Janos, Our Town

6. "New Yorkers are willing to sacrifice and they just accept the hardships of being there by purely just being there because there is just this expectation that it will pay back. And that the harder it is, the bigger the payback will be. It’s kind of like the same sentiment behind some religions: The worse you have it, the bigger the reward will be."
Mira Ptacin, The Atlantic

5. "Any real New Yorker is a you-name-it-we-have-it snob . . . whose heart brims with sympathy for the millions of unfortunates who through misfortune, misguidedness or pure stupidity live anywhere else in the world."
Russell Lynes, New York: The Big Apple Quote Book

4.  "New York has always been the one place where people are nostalgic for when it used to be worse."
Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number

3. "New York is a wonderful, wonderful place to live if you don't know where your home is."
Elizabeth Strout, The Globe and Mail

2. "New Yorkers don't look up because they are too busy looking ahead."
Beverly Rose, Both Feet Off the Ground

1. "In my mind, life and New York are the same."
E.L. Doctorow, The New York Times


Monday, May 9, 2016

Alive


"In the third century since the British took Nieuw Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York, the worldly borough of Man­hattan is still a sovereign place that radiates energy and sharpens the minds of her people. Everything about Manhattan is alive."
Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Sunday, May 8, 2016

New York Night

East 34th

"Night didn't fall in New York so much as rise, the saturation deepening, the volume lifting, the energy elevating and heightening people's consciousness of themselves, their sensations or their thoughts, depending on who they were."
Jane Mendelsohn, Burning Down the House

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Dream Stuff

Williamsburg

"Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?"
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Friday, May 6, 2016

Whirlpool of Humanity

Pixabay

"New York is a big city, a colossal city, a sea, nay, a swirling whirlpool of humanity, where no one knows anyone else, where few people even look at each other and still fewer friendships are made."
Alirio Díaz Guerra, Lucas Guevara

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Trade


"One thing you have to remember about New York is that there are no natural resources here. The city has always been based on trade, and that means con men, money changing hands, and who can cheat who out of what."
Jim Jarmusch, Jim Jarmusch

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

The Only City City

Sixth Avenue

"I like pavement. The sound of my shoes on pavement; stuffed windows; all-night restaurants; sirens in the night — sinister but alive; book and record shops that, on impulse, you can visit at midnight. And in that sense, New York is the world's only city city."
Truman Capote, Truman Capote: Conversations

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Carnival or Freak Show


"To grasp her charm, her alarm, her sometimes rotten scent and rancid underbelly along with her spectacular treasures, you must walk. New York is basically a gigantic, sophisticated carnival or freak show."
Michael K. Corbin, Art for the People

Monday, May 2, 2016

Getting to NYC

Grand Central Terminal

"Getting to NYC is the ultimate "fuck you" to those back home. Who leaves that?"
Amy Haimerl, The Village Voice

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Favorite Drug

Sixth Avenue

"You start to feel like you're speaking like a cliché, but it's really true that there's a kind of energy and a kind of rhythm to life in New York that you get kind of addicted to. Then, want to get back to. New York is my favorite drug."
Aasif Mandvi, amNY