Nobody Notices You

East 67th

"New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice."
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One

Subway Murders

6 Subway Car

"In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car."
George Carlin, Brain Droppings

The Sounds of New York

Bryant Park

"You know what I love about this city? Everything can sound like a jazz riff."
Ray King (Craig Bierko), Sex and the City

Writhing, Uncontrollable

Tompkins Square Park

"Writhing, uncontrollable city! In the years since the city stopped offering garbage collection to Morrisania and Hunts Point, the dogs that roam the streets have been subtly turning into coyotes."
Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader

Sublime Provincialism

"It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall."

Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners

Sharks

SHARK Speedboat Thrill Ride

"When walking here, move quickly. Realize that New Yorkers are like sharks: if they stop moving forward, they die (or else bite your head off)."
Fodor's, Fodor's New York City 2010 

The Worst and Best of Cities

"New Yorkers felt superior to everyone, the natives of all other places. They had earned this cultural supremacy, it was their reward for living in the worst --and best-- city in the world."
Roxana Robinson, This is My Daughter

Inventing the Present

IAC Building seen from the High Line

"New York has never learned the act of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future."
Michel de Certeau, The Blackwell City Reader

Most Glorious Experiment

Morningside Avenue

"New York is the most glorious experiment on earth of different races and divers groups of humanity struggling and scrambling to live together."
Claude McKay, Harlem, Negro Metropolis

No Place Like It

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir

"There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die."

Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

Swinging Town

Saint John the Divine

"God keeps an apartment in New York, incidentally, because this is a swinging town."
Don DeLillo, Underworld

Past is Lost

Long Island City

"The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost."
John Jay Chapman, Emerson. and Other Essays

New York Dining

West 57th St.

"Though one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there."
Oscar Wilde, Epigrams

Made Man

Times Square

"Make your mark in New York and you are a made man."
Mark Twain, quoted in Mark Twain The Bachelor Years

Faster

East 42nd

"In New York, faster was important. The quick get rich faster."
Beverly Swerling, City of Dreams

Dominant Note

Theodore Roosevelt Statue

"Diversity has always been the dominant note of New York. No sooner has one set of varying elements been fused together than another stream has been poured into the crucible."
Theodore Roosevelt, New York

Aspiration and Accomodation

Gramercy Park

"If the energy of New York is the energy of aspiration — let me in there!— the spirit of New York is really the spirit of accommodation — I'll settle for this."
Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate

Useless and Evil Things

H. Stern store on Fifth Avenue

"During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year."
H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy

I Hate New York

"I hate New York,
Except for Broadway op'ning nights,
The magic of those twinkling lights,
The Garden and those crazy fights,
I hate New York."
Steve Allen, Steve Allen's Songs

An Open-Air Drug Bazaar

A needle disposal box in the Lower East Side

"Walking the streets of New York is like observing an open-air drug bazaar. The dealing isn't restricted to one location, like Harlem, nor are the transactions conducted in secrecy. In New York it is easier to get hashish than in Marrakech."
Herbert I. London, The Broken Apple

Wake Up

Yankee Stadium

"Wake up, muscles! We're in New York now!"
Casey Stengel, quoted in Forging Genius

Carcassone

Midtown Manhattan

"The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags."
Henry Miller, Cosmological Eye

Paranoia

"Developing Tray #2" by Anne Collier

"Of the cities I know
New York wins the paranoia award."
David Lehman, The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry

Sad Street

Lexington Avenye

"People on Lexington Avenue are wishing that they lived in a more cheerful street."
Edmund Wilson, The American Earthquake

New York is a Woman

Statue of Liberty seen from Battery Park

"New York is a woman holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand and strangling the earth with the other."
Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night

Chip on the Shoulder

Brooklyn Heights

"The famous chip on the shoulder remains an essential part of Brooklyn's character."
Thomas Oliphant,  Praying for Gil Hodges

Soap Opera

Washington Square Park

"That's all the Village is, honey, just one crazy little soap opera after another."
Ann Bannon, I Am a Woman

Charmless

Elizabeth Street

"New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire”.
Henry James, Selected Letters of Henry James

New York in the Fall

Columbia University

"Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address."

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), You've Got Mail

As Nature Demands

Stonewall Inn

"In New York one can live as Nature demands without setting every one's tongues wagging."
George Chauncey, Gay New York

Where the Lord Must Be

Saint John the Divine

"I'm so tired of getting nowhere
Seeing my prayers going unanswered
I guess the Lord must be in New York City."
Harry Nilsson (lyrics), I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City