Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Memory's Mower



"You might say, if you're the type prone to general observations, that New York City insists on memory's repetitive mower—on the sort of purposeful postmortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course."
Joseph O'Neill, Nederland

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Pursuit of Happiness



"The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty."
Zadie Smith, Feel Free

Monday, July 27, 2020

Vast Note



"New York is such a vast note in the noise that Humanity makes on this earth that it is always ringing in one's ear! Here I am writing to you and remembering nostalgically the rumble of the tramways in the streets. Dear New York! No, loathsome New York!"
Eça de Queiroz, Eça de Queiroz

Friday, July 24, 2020

Born New Yorkers



"Whatever the city contains it contains no born New Yorkers. That is one of the phenomena that has here most struck me. I never meet born New Yorkers in the home of their birth."
Ford Madox Ford, New York Essays

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Boosting Inmunity



"I’m from New York, where we’re given a lipstick-stained mug filled with dirty hot-dog water to carry down Sixth Avenue until a big drop of what is either Legionnaire’s-disease-infected air-conditioner leak or somebody else’s spit lands in it, then we drink that to get our immune-system boost, thank you very much."
Susanna Wolff, The New Yorker

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Crazy Beautiful



"New York City is crazy and beautiful and really close to my heart, and I’ve always had dear friends here – family, actually, I would say."

Benedict Cumberbatch, GQ

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Eternally Free





"The dawn breaks each day feeling New York's heart consumed with new zeal. She hates to be absorbed in a fog of fruitless brooding and empty inactivity. Moreover, she wants to be free, eternally free. Never within her four corners will she tolerate the air of captivity."
Sri Chinmoy, America the Beautiful

Monday, July 20, 2020

Not Afraid of Humanness



"In New York they are not afraid of any humanness. Even when they are in themselves craven-cowardly, cowardly enough to turn their own stomachs, they still turn their humanness unfearfully face-outward like upturned faces of a pack of cards."
Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane

Friday, July 17, 2020

New York Hardens You



"I take it for granted now, but New York is intense and overwhelming, especially when your brain is still developing. The shit you see—including many piles of actual human shit— definitely affects you and hardens you."
Colin Jost, A Very Punchable Face

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Falling in Love with New York

Times Square (Pixabay)

"Millions of people fall in love with New York all the time. It might be terrible and disgusting and unlivable, but it also makes you walk around any other city like an asshole saying, 'You call that a bagel/financial district/traffic jam/naked cowboy/billionaire oligarch/pricey hamburger/art museum/nightlife/everything?'"
Devin Friedman, Medium

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Not So Huge and Complex



"The thing about New York is that when you first move there, it seems like an impossibly immense place with so many lives simultaneously unspooling, so many conflicting realities, that if you don’t do anything wildly strange and egregious you can live your life for the most part rather privately. And then one day New York doesn’t seem nearly so huge and complex and the thousands upon thousands who passed through your life, people you would in all likelihood never see again start to appear a second time, and a third."
Scott Spencer, An Ocean Without a Shore

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Intense



"Oh, New York! It's almost too much for me to take. Is it because I'm such a smalltown girl? I love the excitement, but sometimes I feel like I've overdosed on it. Like I want to go inside and rest now, only there IS no inside, no place to escape the continual LIFE. We work hard, we play hard, we laugh hard, we argue hard, we get mad at each other hard. It's very intense."
Ellen Wittlinger, Heart on My Sleeve

Monday, July 13, 2020

Most Talented Individuals



"New York City is home to some of the most talented individuals anywhere and whether you are born here or a transplant, the city has always had a tendency to breed perfection. "
Aquaria, Forbes Magazine

Friday, July 10, 2020

New York is Not Dead



"People always say, oh, New York is dead. And I say you don't hang out with enough young people because they have a completely different perspective."
Crystal Moselle, NPR

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Psychic Distance

Brooklyn apartment building (Pixabay)

"Life in New York, as I realized after moving west, can be far lonelier than living in rural Wyoming. The Wyoming cowboy, whose nearest neighbor may be eighty miles away, is separated from companionship only by geographic distance. The New York apartment dweller may be separated by two inches of plasterboard and never exchange a greeting. Shorn of physical distance from others, people create unbridgeable psychic distance."
Bernard Rollin, Putting the Horse before Descartes

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

New York Will Come Back



"New York will come back. It always does. The 1918 flu, the Great Depression, the 1970s fiscal crisis, the Aids epidemic, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the 2008 financial crash and Superstorm Sandy could not lay low New York for good. Predicting the demise of America’s biggest city, such a source of envy and fascination and resentment for the rest of the nation, is a longtime parlor game. The city is too attractive, too diverse, too overflowing with opportunity – even now – to crumble."
Ross Barkan, The Guardian

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Cultural Center of America



"I'm a New Yorker and I always feel like London is the city New York is pretending to be. You know, it truly is multicultural. It seems like the center of the English-speaking world. New York is the cultural center of America but London is the cultural center of the world."
Ethan Hawke, Associated Press

Monday, July 6, 2020

City of Expulsion



"New York is rejection. It is the city of expulsion. When you get here, the citizens and the whole business and government set up is geared to get you the fuck out. 'Don't you understand,' the city says, 'you are just another pain in the ass and I've already got too many already so I'm blowing you out.' New York is the anus of the world."
Edward Beardshear, Some Die Mad

Friday, July 3, 2020

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Lines of Snow and Popping Corks



"Baby won't you take me there
Make it like you really care
I am feeling good up there
Just keep the diamonds in my hair
Make me feel good right now
Like everything does in this town
Lines of snow and popping corks
Money, drugs in old New York."
Moby, New York, New York

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

City of Possibility

Manhattan (Pixabay)

"Contrary to opinion, the city does sleep but with one eye
 open; and even on the doziest of nights, you can hear the crackle of dreams, for New York is the ultimate city of possibility. "

Larry Kirwan, Green Suede Shoes