Banquet

Mad. Sq. Eats

"To paraphrase Mae West, 'New York is a banquet and most of the suckers in it are starving to death.'"
Chuck Lawliss, Retro NY

Manhattan Domicile

Bowery

"People talk of the pride a New Yorker must feel in his great city! To be a citizen of New York is a disgrace. A domicile on Manhattan Island is a thing to be confessed with apologies and humiliation. "
George Templeton Strong, Diary: Post-war years, 1865-1875

City of the Future

Window on the Upper West Side

"Great city, New York. The city of the future."
Nella Larsen, Passing

Dual Heart

Spuyten Duyvil (Wikimedia Commons)

"The Bowling Green and Spuyten Duyvil, the modern mart and the ancient forest, the two extremities of our Island, thus hold in epitome, perhaps, the dual heart of Man."
Walter Prichard Eaton, New York

Singing City

"He couldn't imagine a city more beautiful, more delightful, more perfect for him than New York. Once the temperature rose above fifty-five, it was as if the city had awakened from a deep slumber and the buildings and trees and statues were singing as one."
Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers

Ten Years

World Trade Center

"New York is a different city every 10 years, and many resist that change, but it doesn't matter—it reinvents every decade."
Sean MacPherson, Haute Living

American Soul

Brooklyn Bridge

"New York is the soul of America."
Earl Sparling, quoted in Images of the American City

Diagnosis

Midtown Manhattan

"If New York were a patient, it would be diagnosed with agrypnia excitata, a rare genetic condition characterized by insomnia, nervous energy, constant twitching, and dream enactment. An apt description of a city that never sleeps, a place where one comes to reinvent himself."
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

True Time

Park Avenue South

"Whoever visits New-York feels as he does in a watchmaker's shop ; everybody goes there for the true time, and feels on leaving it as if he had been wound up or regulated anew, and better than he could have done it himself."
Theodore Dwight, Things as They Are

Companionship

East River Waterfront

"The most positive thing of all is that nobody ever has to be alone in New York. You're alone with New York, which makes a whole world of difference. What other companionship could be so varied, stimulating, dramatic, and so available?"
Anita Loos and Helen Hayes, quoted in New York: The Big Apple Quote Book

Dream Breaker

Financial District

"The machine that is New York is noisily chugging along outside my window without giving two shits if I make it or not. The city isn't meant to foster your dreams; it is meant to break them."

Greg Jacobs, The Huffington Post

Beauty and Grandeur

Battery Park

"I walked the whole length of Broadway, and found that this city has a beauty and grandeur resembling that of mountains. At the same time, it's so much a city that you no longer have any desire to visit another after this."

Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre

Contrast

Fifth Avenue

"The thing that interested me then as now about New York—as indeed about any great city, but more definitely New York because it was and is so preponderantly large—was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed  between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant."
Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City

Terrifying

Oculus

"New York is terrifying. Even when motionless the people seem to whistle through the air like bullets."

Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, 1920-1945

Live Sight

Williamsburg North

"Nothing is as panoramically familiar as your first live sight of New York. Not a single exclamation of ruin or edifice, but an entire novel you know by heart. It is the eternal, expanding cityscape that man-hugs you as you cross the bridge from Queens on the way in from the airport. You already know so much about the place: you know what the people sound like, you know what they think, you know about their theatrical anger and their dust-dry humor. You know how they walk, their gestures, how they order their coffee. You know what they eat, what's in their fridges and closets. You already know what the phones and the sirens sound like. New York is a club you've been a member of for a long time."
A.A. Gill, To America With Love

Upstate

New York State flag at the Hayden Planetarium

"I forget New York even has an upstate. Seems unnecessary after Manhattan."
Libba Bray, The Diviners

Suburbia in the City

Kmart

"I didn't come to New York to go to brand stores, to alleviate suburban people and create suburbia in the city, which is what's happened."
Chris Noth, AM New York

Gramercy Park

Gramercy Park North

"Gramercy is a rough neighborhood. If you look at someone the wrong way on the streets of Gramercy, they might unfollow you on Instagram."
Judah Friedlander, The New York Times

NYC Magic

Mulberry Street

"So many of the important life lessons I've learned are written all over this city—the streets, subways, bars, restaurants, theaters, parks, and comedy clubs. Fortunately, those lessons have all been completely obscured by a fine mist of urine and spray paint, with a confetti of bedbugs and survival sprinkled into the mix. This is the magic of NYC: you're always starting over and moving fast."
Amy Schumer, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

Busy Place

Soho

"New York is not a place in which to reveal one's pecuniary embarrassment. It was not that New York was hardhearted, Clancy decided. It was that it was a busy place, and had no time to listen to whines."
Arthur Somers Roche, Find the Woman

Centrifuge

Oculus

"New York is a center that pulls people in and a centrifuge that spins them out into the world."
Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis

Contradictions and Illusions

"I almost believe there is no New York; there is only a set of projections, and it can be anything you want. You hear it every day, so it must be true! It has the worst people, it has the best; it's the worst, it's the best. After all of these contradicting visions, you have to say there is no place like New York. It is the acceptance of the contradictions and illusions."
Milton Glaser, Village Voice

Spiritual

"Have you ever seen them let out cows in the spring from the barn and they roll in the grass like they can't believe it? That's like me and New York. There's something spiritual about it, really, and I'm an atheist. It must be the architecture. No, it's not, is it? It's the people, the limitless sense of potential."
Ricky Gervais, New York

Lighthouse

Empire State Building

"New York is an island, and has all the intense romance of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite height upon very finite foundations. It is almost like a lofty lighthouse upon a lonely rock."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What I Saw in America

Cocktail Time

"It is time for cocktails. The moment for which all of New York works, lies, exercises, hurries, dresses."
Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Silence

Alphabet City

"What can New York—noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, stormy, turbulent New York—have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all-swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool, the strife and the warfare, and the fever and the trembling— who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose, the hushed lethargy of silence?"
Walt Whitman, The Journalism: 1834-1846

Bigger than Life

"The world pours into Times Square. Like lost souls emerging from the purgatory of the trains (dark rattling tunnels, smelly pornographic toilets, newsstands futilely splashing the subterranean graydepths with unreal magazine colors), the newyork faces push into the air: spilling into 42nd Street and Broadway — a scattered defeated army. And the world of that street bursts like a rocket into a shattered phosphorescent world. Giant signs—Bigger! Than! Life!—blink off and on."
John Rechy, City of Night

Bright Lights, Big City

"Amy gazed in wonder at the New York skyline, gleaming in the night sky. If anything, it looked bigger at night. A vast tribute to human might, with office lights shining far brighter than the stars and galaxies above. It was true what they said: bright lights, big city."
Brian Minchin, Doctor Who: The Forgotten Army