Going to Hell

Downing Street

"New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there."
Robert M. Pirsig, Lila

Sparkling Treasure

Times Square

"For the tourist, each moment in New York is, at least potentially, a sparkling treasure, an immensity of experience; for the New Yorker, there is a comforting mundanity to everyday life, a predictability and a delicious smallness."
Murray Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps

Do Not Invade

Lexington Avenue Armory

"There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade."
Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), Casablanca

How Funny You Are

Central Park

"How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left."
Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

Sense of Competition

Fifth Avenue

"In New York, one's sense of competition had to be practical: there was always someone doing better than you, always."
Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty

Heaven

Riverisde Park South

"To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying."
P.G. Wodehouse, America, I Like You

Capitalistic Capital

NASDAQ

"New York is the democratic capitalistic capital of the world, and the most modern of cities."
Robert A.M. Stern, quoted in New York: An Illustrated History

Prick Measuring

"I hate New York. Every time you meet somebody, it's prick-measuring time. My success can pee farther than yours, nyah, nyah."
Marge Piercy, Longings of Women

Great Woman

Joan of Arc statue

"I can't with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It's like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they're a drunk or a thief. I've loved the city my whole life -- to me, it's like a great woman."
Woody Allen, Woody Allen: Interviews

Everyone is an Exile

90 St. - Elmhurst Av. station

"That unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Cold Wind

Windsock at the West 30th Street Heliport

"When the cold wind comes
It lives in New York City
And the street is no place to be
But there you are
So you try hard or you die hard."
James Brown,  Down And Out In New York City

Great Expectations

New York Times building and Midtown

"I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist.
And I'd turned out to be right."
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing

Taxi Rules

Taxi stand on Eighth Avenue

"New York taxi rules:
1. Driver speaks no English.
2. Driver just got here two days ago from someplace like Senegal.
3. Driver hates you."
Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

The Bronx

Spuyten Duyvil

"The world is the Bronx, and the Bronx is the world."
Adam Mansbach, The End of the Jews

Big Mouth

Frank Lloyd Wright Room at the Met

"New York is the biggest mouth in the world."
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City

Unimportance

Chrysler Building seen from Bowery

"New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance."
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Royal Celebration

Guggenheim Museum

"No city in the world draws more artists -- be they painters or writers, sculptors or musicians, poets or opera divas -- than New York. And if the place can be hard on them while they're alive, at least it celebrates them royally when they're dead, with a host of museums, galleries, concert halls, and enduring legends."
Brad Dunn and Daniel Hood, New York: The Unknown City

No Tradition

Columbia University

"Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago."
G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

Upward and Outward

Brooklyn Bridge

"New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels."
Dalia Sofer, The Septembers of Shiraz

The Loftiest of Cities

Empire State Building

"New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression."

E.B. White, Here is New York

Cash-Sucking Vortex

Bank depository in Midtown

"The city is a cash-sucking vortex; a scavenger metropolis."
Warren Leight, The I Hate New York Guidebook

Shut-In

West Chelsea

"I hate New York. It is always noisy, everything is somber, shut-in, severe."
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin

The Outer Boroughs

Staten Island Ferry Whitehall Terminal

"It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan."
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

The Real New York Marathon

2014 TCS New York City Marathon

"The real New York Marathon: The inspiring, embarrassing, and sometimes debilitating things you must endure in order to live and love in Manhattan."
Cindy Chupack, The Between Boyfriends Book

Noisy Family

5 Pointz

"New York is like a big, noisy family getting ready to move to another town -- there's that same atmosphere of bustle and good-natured dissension and expectancy."
Anton Myrer, The Last Convertible

Thought and Life

Washington Square Park

"Farewell to New York City, where twenty months have presented me with a richer and more varied exercise for thought and life, than twenty years could in any other part of these United States."
Margaret Fuller, Margaret Fuller: Essays on American Life and Letters

Chaotic Grandeur

Empire State Building and West Village

"In the long run, the spectacle and chaotic grandeur of the city, like the sun, were too overwhelming to view with the naked eyes of wonder."
Jay McInerney, The Good Life

Hieronymus Bosch

Mott Street

"New York is like a fucking Hieronymus Bosch! It's like jumping into a bushel of overripe peaches! You could commit murder here and nobody'd know the difference!"
John Nichols, The Magic Journey

The Worst Place to Lose Something

Court Square subway station

"The worst place to lose something in New York City is the place where you cannot go to get it even if you find it, even if it is just beyond your reach: the track bed of the subway, where neither station agent nor police nor firefighter will descend, where the rat holds dominion, where the third rail silently harbors its 600 volts and where a 350-ton train could be right around the corner."
Randy Kennedy, Subwayland

Soul Shaking

Conservatory Garden

"New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief."
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin