Latin Mass

"New York is so often publicly associated with creativity and innovation that outsiders actually come to believe it. The truth is that behavior here is as codified as the Latin Mass."
Anna Quindlen, Rise and Shine

Too Big

Harlem

"New York City is simply too big. I have lived in it too long to hate it, but I know it too well to love it."
Dennis Smith, Report From Engine Co. 82

Senegal

Mural on Lafayette Street

"I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's great lie. New York is Senegal with machines.”
Federico García Lorca, Lorca: Obra Completa/ Lorca: Complete Work

Squalid Barbarism

Centre Street

"No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance."
Rudyard Kipling, Letters Of Travel - 1892-1913

Trade and Vanity

St. James Theatre

"Broadway is Trade and Vanity made flesh."
Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson, With Annotations - 1823-1835

The Hypocrisy of Underground

Union Square

"There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is."
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

Talented Bums

Central Park

"New York attracts the most talented people in the world in the arts and professions. It also attracts them in other fields. Even the bums are talented."
Edmund G. Love, Subways Are For Sleeping

The Most Romantic Symbol

The Empire State Building and 5th Avenue

"New Yorkers fell in love with the soaring structure and almost overnight, the Empire State Building became the most romantic and widely recognizable symbol of the city."
Ric Burns, James Sanders and Lisa Aldes, New York: An Illustrated History

Mind Gone Berserk

Avenue A

"Soon technology, too, will disintegrate. Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk."
Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka

Tourette's

East Houston

"New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom."
Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

Casual Summer

Bryant Park

"Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirt-sleeves."
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

On Their Toes

Jim Kempner Fine Art

"Roaming the streets of New York, we encountered many examples of this delightful quality of New Yorkers, forever on their toes, violently, restlessly involving themselves in the slightest situation brought to their attention, always posing alternatives, always ready with an answer or an argument."
Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels

Thought and Cheesecake

Le Penseur at Columbia University

"When a man is tired of New York he is tired of work. And thought. And cheesecake."
David Frost, The New York Times World of New York

Animal

"The High Line Zoo"

"I miss the animal buoyancy in New York, and the animal vitality. I do not mind that it had no meaning and no depth."

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin

Collection of Villages

Central Park

"New York was not a city but, on the colossal scale whose measure one can take only by setting foot in the New World, an agglomeration of villages. In each of these an inhabitant could have spent his life without ever leaving except to go to work."
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar

Where Mankind is Real

Fifth Avenue

"Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real and I myself am not a dream."
Helen Keller, Midstream

The Cliché of Single Life

Harlem Meer

"It's harder to find a good guy in New York than anywhere else. It's the cliché of single life in Manhattan, but only because it's true."
Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed

Ecstasy about Architecture

Chrysler Building

"Manhattan has consistently inspired in its beholders ecstasy about architecture."
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

Wretched Refuse

The Immigrants statue in Battery Park

"One thing I love about living in New York is it's every different type of person piled one on top of the other. I am for open immigration, but that sign we have in the front of the Statue of Liberty, 'Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.' Can't we just say, 'Hey, the door's open. We'll take whoever you got.' Do we have to specify 'The wretched refuse?'"
Jerry Seinfeld, Seinlanguage

It Doesn't Belong to Me

"Love Me" street art by Curtis Kulig

"I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it."
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's 

Sense of Movement

Moving truck on West 113th

"There's a tangible sense of movement in New York: People are always moving up, moving on, moving toward something bigger, richer, better. So we never stop to fully embrace where we live because we know that circumstances might arise hat call us onward. A two-year lease feels like handcuffs; actual ownership is a prison sentence."
Allison Winn Scotch, The Department of Lost & Found

Twilight

The Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges

"As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night."
Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

Surviving Anywhere

Cranberry Street

"New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?"
Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

24 Frames

"New York is fast, how do I compare
It's 24 frames in every second of a movie
Can't see frame change but it's always moving."
Gil Scott-Heron, New York is Killing Me

Sex in the City

Museum of Sex

"New York City is all about sex. People getting it, people trying to get it, people who can't get it. No wonder the city never sleeps. It's too busy trying to get laid."

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Sex and the City

Clears the Brain

Bryant Park

"I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain."

James Agate, A Shorter Ego

What Nobody Else Wants

"Living in New York City gives people real incentives to want things that nobody else wants."

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Late-Night Party

"Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired, you've had a headache since you arrived, but you can't leave because then you'd miss the party."

Simon Hoggart, America 

Large Man

"Adam" at the Time Warner Center

"New York is hard and concentrated. California is a small woman saying: 'Fuck me." New York is a large man saying: 'Fuck you!'"
George Carlin, Brain Droppings

Of New York and Dolphins

Crosby St.

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel. New York, wars and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy