Friday, March 29, 2019

Multicultural



"I've lived in New York City for almost four years now. And you know what I love about this amazing city? It's how multicultural it is. You can bring your own everything to this placeyour own music, your own language, your own styleand there will be space for it."
Trevor Noah, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Message of the City



"When I drive across the 59th street bridge, the view of New York is a sight I always enjoy. I can feel the rumble of the cars over the oaken roadbed. Light streams onto its roadbed through the I-beams above. And as cars move along underneath the maze of metal, the light seems to separate into bright and dark strips, like morse code beeps, dit-dah, dit-dah. Black and white against the glossy yellow of the taxi cab, the black and white checkered strip on the side of every taxi. The message of the city, good and bad, bad and good."
Joel Reitman, B is for Brooklyn, D is for Dog

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Misfit



"New York is without question the best place in the world to be a misfit. If you've been cast out by some small-minded little town somewhere for being different—gay, trans, goth, too intellectual, too into fashion, a member of some persecuted minority or religious groupyou know you'll find a home here, and a community of hundreds or thousands of people who came here for the same reason."
Jake Dobkin, Ask a Native New Yorker

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

New York Sound



"When people talk about New York City, they usually talk about the size of it: the height of the buildings and the endless rivers of people flowing in narrow channels between them, the way I used to have to squeeze through the Piles before the Piles were vanquished. But what really strikes me is the sound—a constant hum of traffic and footsteps and phones ringing and kids squealing and someone, always, cursing at someone else."
Lauren Oliver, Broken Things

Monday, March 25, 2019

Leading Man



"Undeniably the globe's other place, its virtual second home, is New York. It's not just because Manhattan looks so memorable, or that it was the gateway for so much immigration. It is the first city of the electric age. We know it because it's been in our living room, kitchen and bedroom all our lives. New York is the greatest, most enduring, leading-man, heart-throb location of the screen. New York is the stage of our collective dramas."
A.A. Gill, The Golden Door

Friday, March 22, 2019

Bourgeois Improvement

Central Park North


"I am still in New York, but the city I lived in then is not the city I inhabit now. Money remains ascendant, but its glow has spread across the borough of Manhattan. The faded signs, tattered awnings, peeling posters, and filthy bricks that gave the streets of my old Upper West Side neighborhood a generally jumbled and bleary look have disappeared. When I find myself in the old haunts now, my eyes are  met with the tightened outlines of bourgeois improvement."
Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Spring Morning



"It was one of those spring mornings on which New York is the most brilliant city in the world, when the air comes off the Atlantic with a heady tang like frosted wine, and the white pinnacles of its towers stand up in a sky from which every particle of impurity seems to have been washed by magic; one of those mornings when all the vitality and impetuous aspiration that is New York insinuates itself as the only manner of life."
Leslie Charteris, The Saint of New York

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Daydream

Central Park Reservoir (Pixabay)

"When spring came to New York City, the world felt like a daydream. The trees budded out into cotton candy, people lunched outside, and the ring-a-ding tune of Mister Softee trucks whirled on every other block."
Joseph Cassara, The House of Impossible Beauties

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Last Look



"I guess that's New York for you. Right? Boss one minute, in the gutter the next. Best you can hope for is one last look at the stars before you go."
Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), Billions

Monday, March 18, 2019

Betrayal



"Manhattan is peopled by people resigned to being betrayed daily by their own hopes. From this comes their incomparable wit, their cynicism and what is taken to be their realism."
John Berger, Sense of Sight

Friday, March 15, 2019

Floating City

Manhattan skyline


"The city of New York is to-day the same great eddy of the mixed human elements of the whole world that it was when the Duke of York gave it its name. A vast impersonal floating city, rising and falling with the general tide of human life throughout the world, America is no more responsible for its good or its evil than any other country."
M.D. Conway, Fraser's Magazine

Thursday, March 14, 2019

New York History



"Only New York itself can write and understand its history. Biographies are failures. There is enough happening in any one person in five minutes of his day to occupy a biographer an entire lifetime. One would have to exist longer than Methuselah to describe and understand what happens one noon hour in New York."
Jean Toomer, A Jean Toomer Reader

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Learning and Growing



"New York has always had my heart. I moved here when I was 20 years old. And I just love how it's a melting pot of people from all over the world--all faiths, all backgrounds, all races--all of us together, just learning and growing. So, I love my city."
Marla Maples, Today

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

High



"I despair when Shakespeare and Co. closes in favor of another Foot Locker. There's no way to be in good faith on this island anymore. You have to crush so many things with your mind vise just to get through the day. Which seems to me another aspect of the ad outside of my window: willful intoxication. Or to put it more snappily: 'You don’t have to be high to live here, but it helps.'"
Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books

Monday, March 11, 2019

Interlude



"It's that magnificent interlude in New York between winter and spring, when you feel the warmth stirring, and you remember that the dreadful naked trees will inevitably sprout tiny green buds, soon. Everyone rushes into the parks, the streets--and you even forget that, very soon, summer will come scorchingly, dropping from the sky like a blanket of steam."
John Rechy, City of Night 

Friday, March 8, 2019

American Engine



"New York is absolutely the American engine. New Yorkers are tolerant by nature; they have to be. What they don't tolerate is intolerance."
Jonathan Galassi, Words Without Borders

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Not Like in the Movies



"My New York is not a scene from Sex and the City. And as much as I wish I could be, I’m not Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s not like the movies; it is much, much harder. But it is my own, and it is fucking magical."
Giana Ricci, Thought Catalog

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Get Out



"I wanted nothing more than to get out. Because New York was dirty and gray and noisy and claustrophobic and I think that New York of all places would appreciate it when I say: Fuck this."
Leslie Cohen, This Love Story Will Self-Destruct

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

March in New York



"Nobody in New York got any use for March. It's an in-between month. It ain't winter and it ain't spring. You don't know what to wear, and you don't know how to act. It's miserable. One thing I learned about New Yorkers is that they like things black or white. None of this gray jive. And, man, March is the grayest."
Ed McBain, Big Man

Monday, March 4, 2019

Infatuation



"I realize that the longest love affair I've ever had in my life is with this goddamned city and its goddamned citizens. When I first came here, I was infatuated. The Madness. I took a chance based on an illusion. But beneath that false love was the seed of a genuine love, true love. Now what I have for New York is like married love, kind of a warts (cooties)-and-all thing."
Sparkle Hayter, Revenge of the Cootie Girls

Friday, March 1, 2019

New York in the Snow

Central Park


"I love the surreality of snowstorms in NYC. Familiar neighborhood places take on an otherworldly feel. The snow adds a dimension of serene strangeness to a city that is defined by its capacity to change instantaneously."
 Vivienne Gucwa, New York in the Snow