Parallel Villages

Pomander Walk

"New York is a collection of parallel villages and the inhabitants of each can be surprisingly parochial."
Margaret Maron, Past Imperfect

Lottery

New York Lottery banners

"To live in New York you have to have won the lottery and your parents have to have won the lottery and everyone has to have invested wisely."
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

Superlatives

One World Trade Center

"More than anything else New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, the biggest is the norm."
Marilyn J. Appleberg, I Love New York Guide

Theme-Park City

Manhattan Mall

"Today New York is on its way to becoming a 'theme-park city,' where people can get the illusion of the urban experience without the diversity, spontaneity and unpredictability that have always been its hallmarks. Like the suburbs New Yorkers so long snubbed, the city is becoming more private, more predictable, and more homogenized."
Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett, Suburbanization of New York

Lonely Dinosaur

Empire State Building

"The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas."
Vincent Joseph Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism

The Permission of Indifference

Central Park

"I can be me in any fashion I wish and you can be you, and all of New York will grant us the permission of indifference. You can get that nowhere else in the world, I believe, and once you've grown to appreciate the freedom that indifference grants you, you will never want to give it up."
Isaac Asimov, Past, Present and Future

Always a Winner

"New York City wins. It's always gonna win."
Sharona Fleming (Bitty Schram), Monk 

Depression

Manhattan skyline

"The gray Manhattan skyline rose against a pewter sky. Gray. Everywhere she looked. No wonder depression was rampant in this city. No wonder everyone was in therapy."
Cathy Holton, Beach Trip

One Rule to Become a Real New Yorker

New Yorker Hotel

"If you want to become a real New Yorker, there's only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe."
Ellen R. Shapiro, Relocating to New York City and Surrounding Areas

Self-Image

Times Square

"New York is the kind of place where a person changes: he becomes identical with his own self-image."
Peter Esterhazy, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube)

Magic of New York

UBS

"That's the magic of New York. You can go through any revolving door and you never know who you'll bump into on the other side."
Jill Kargman, The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund

Never-Ending Reach

Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges

"New York was a city whose reach seemed never-ending, even greedy; for miles and miles, the only perceptible changes as you tried to leave it behind were a diminishing of scale and encroaching grime, as if you were leaving a literal heartland, heading out to the extremities of an old, weary body."
Julia Glass, The Whole World Over

Concrete Jungle

Midtown Manhattan

"New York!!!!
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,
There's nothing you can’t do,
Now you're in New York!!!
Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, Empire State of Mind

Pursuit of Lunch

Morningside Heights

"Manhattan is a narrow island off the coast of New Jersey devoted to the pursuit of lunch."
Raymond Sokolov, quoted in The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom

Saint Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day Parade

"Saint Patrick's Day in New York is the most fantastic affair, and in past years on Fifth Avenue, from Forty-fourth Street to Ninety- sixth Street, the white traffic lines were repainted green for the occasion. All the would-be Irish, has-been Irish and never-been Irish, seem to appear true-blue Irish overnight. Everyone is in on the act, but it is a very jolly occasion and I have never experienced anything like it anywhere else in the world."
Brendan Behan, Brendan Behan's New York

Amusement Park

Victorian Gardens

"The city is an amusement park: Everything is concrete, it's full of tourists, and food vendors line the sidewalks. It's like living in a casino: The lights never dim, there's an incessant din of bells and horns, and there's always someone, somewhere, crying in a bathroom."
Jane Borden, I Totally Meant to Do That

Shape-Shifting Demon

Broadway and 125th

"New York's a shape-shifting demon, never letting you get your bearings before it morphs again."

Andrew Vachss, Pain Management

The Horizon

41st Street

"Sailors know to train their eyes on the horizon to avoid seasickness. When you're landlocked in New York City, look at the farthest curb, which in its own way, is the horizon line."
Ann Beattie, Walks With Men

A City Without Makeup

West Chelsea

"There's a moment as the sky grows dark each day over Manhattan when the lights from the streets and buildings is equal in luminescence to the fading light in the sky. It's a fleeting second, but all at once everything has the same dull sickly glow. It's the city after the sun's cleansing brightness and before the evening's artificial sparkle. It's simply a city without any makeup."
Josh Kilmer-Purcell, I Am Not Myself These Days

No Regrets

Record store in the Village

"One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes -- I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."
Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

What Happens in New York...

Zuccotti Park

"What happens in New York gets either copied or criticized."
Alan M. Beck,  New York's Poop Scoop Law

Ongoing Work of Art

"Rose Crystal Tower" in Union Square

"New York is a city that is carved out as a composition. That is what is so interesting about [this place], it's about the composition of the whole city, almost like an organic work of art that is ongoing."
Daniel Libeskind, Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces

When New York is Most Beautiful

Bryant Park

"New York is never so beautiful as when you're leaving in six hours."
Homer Bigart, Reporting America at War

Of Prose and Fantasy

Madison Square Park

"Here I was in New York, city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age."
Leon Trotsky, My Life

Manhattan Skyline

Manhattan skyline

"The Manhattan skyline shimmered in the imaginations of all the nations, and people everywhere cherished the ambition, however unattainable, of landing one day upon that legendary foreshore."
Jan Morris, Manhattan '45

What Makes New York so Special

Miss New York docked at Battery Park

"What makes New York so special? It’s the invitation of the Statue of Liberty – give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free. Not restricted to English only."
Jesse Jackson, quoted in Presidential Campaign Communication: The Quest for the White House

Hay Seed

Brooklyn skyline

"A Brooklynite is a natural-born hay seed, and can never become a real New Yorker. He can't be trained into it. Consolidation didn't make him a New Yorker, and nothin' on earth can."
William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

Faster Beat

Fifth Avenue

"New York is a city that pulses with a faster beat, where people live at a higher frequency, and experience a higher level of consciousness."
Victor Grippi, The Ninth Cube

The Things New York has to Offer

"I miss New York and the things it has to offer quite a good deal, and will probably miss it more as time goes on."
George Gershwin, The Gershwin Years 

The Most Effective Medicine

Roosevelt Island

"I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken — the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land the globe affords."
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days & Collect

Humor and Foul Language

Caroline's

"A real New Yorker has a way of speaking: a sharp tongue and utter confidence in humor as the appropriate tool for unraveling any event. When humor doesn't do it, there's always foul language to fall back on, although that approach is usually reserved for traffic related matters like taxi accidents and Jersey drivers."

J. Schwartzman, The Reading Room