New York Divorce

Family Court

"A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue."

Edith Wharton, The Descent of Man and Other Stories

Lonely

Forsyth Street Garden Club

"Everything about New York is magical. Everything exhilarates. But it's also overwhelmingly lonely."
Brooke Berman, No Place Like Home

California

Winter Garden

"Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spend in New York."
Harry Ruby, quoted in The Traveling Curmudgeon

Anything is Delivered

Ninth Avenue

"One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me."
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck

NY Simply Is

Midtown Manhattan seen from Roosevelt Island

"New York is not a Moloch; it is just not an intimate city, and it does not care whether you love it or not. It does not reach out; it simply is. I love the fact that it does not coerce you, has no expectations of you, lets you be, but has more than enough to offer if you want to engage."
Ernestine Bradley, The Way Home

Merchandising

Ralph Lauren store

"You cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich -- the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising."
Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

Gay New York

Christopher Park

"Gay New Yorkers have it all. Culture, trash, sex, a huge population, and a plethora of gay media with which to reinforce themselves. Oh, and it's all located on one island called Manhattan."
Steve Dow, Gay

Gentrification

East Houston

"When I first moved to New York, it was dingy, disgusting, dirty, ugly, flea-ridden, stinky and altogether terrifying -- but then, sadly, the whole city started to go uphill."
Ted Mosby (Bob Saget), How I Met Your Mother

Rent and Hot Dogs

Gray's Papaya

"Rent stabilization was an indelible part of New York life, like Gray's Papaya."
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck

A Little Bit of Crazy

West Village

"That is the difference between being weird in New York and anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else, odd is odd. In New York City, a little bit of crazy is a little bit of all right."
S.B. Howard, Strange But True: New York City

Patina of Age

IAC headquarters

"In a global capital like New York, neither people nor buildings have the chance to accumulate the patina of age.  Most residents are not born there, neither do they live in the same house for generations, and the physical fabric of the city is constantly changing around them."
Sharon Zukin, Naked City

Limitless Options

Eleanor Roosevelt Statue

"In New York, we can have the best of everything. It's a city with limitless options. So we get accustomed to thinking that there's always something better out there, because there usually is."
Noelle Hancock, My Year with Eleanor

New York Dating

Canal Street

"For all the excitement and glamour, life in the big city does have its downside. I mean, if you thought Wall Street was full of bullshitters, try having a relationship here."
Tommy (Scott Porter), The Good Guy

Reinvention

Times Square

"New York wasn't somewhere you came to find yourself again, it was somewhere you came to become something, someone, new."
Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York

The Watching City

Allen Street

"I arrived at Penn Station and looked over my shoulder and smiled at New York City. The city that doesn't care where you are, where you're going, or what you want. The city that doesn't sleep but she watches you everyday and doesn't even acknowledge your feelings. She will destroy you if you are not on your 'A' game. New York has made many famous and destroyed many."
Karim Ramos, From Fat Farm to Phat Farm

Falling Out of Love

Central Park South

"Falling out of love with New York is a situation of not having enough money... If you have money, it gets better and better."
Joan Didion, The Revolution Will Be Accessorized

First Encounter

Freeman Alley

"Most Americans loathe New York City at first encounter. The filth and squalor, the graffiti and noise, the hysteria and violence, the decadence and outrageous expense——these impressions smite the sensibilities of visitors from the more orderly and well-tended cities of the west. But it's all clever camouflage—-designed to keep out the fainthearted—as any New Yorker knows."
Katherine Neville, Calculated Risk

Show-Off

Manhattan skyline

"New York is the big show-off of American cities."
Susan Orlean, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

A Walk in the Park

Riverside Park

"This is New York City, baby. A simple walk in the park can get you killed."
Neil Shaw (Wesley Snipes), The Art of War

Size Does Matter

432 Park Avenue

"Whoever said 'size doesn't matter' wasn't talking about New York apartments."
Arthur Nersesian, Manhattan Loverboy

The Fairest of Cities

East River

"Situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises, like Venice, from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth."
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

Exhausted New Yorkers

42nd Street Subway Station

"People in New York love to tell you how exhausted they are. Then they fall apart when someone says, 'Yeah, you look pretty tired'".
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Book Writers

Random House Headquarters

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book - and does.”
Groucho Marx, quoted in ABC's of Library Promotion

Not Nice

Eighth Avenue

"I hate cities where people are nice. In New York you walk down the street and you hear, 'Fuck you, die!!' And I love to scream right back, Fuck you, Sister Mary Louise!'"
Joan Rivers, I Hate Everyone... Starting with Me

New York Morals

News Corporation

"I, a virtuous person only a year before, after immersion for one year — during one year in the New York morals — had no more conscience than a millionaire."
Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

Charming Rogue

Brooklyn Bridge Park

"Living in New York is like being married to a charming rogue. The roguishness almost outweighs the charm. But when you face up to this, and are ready to leave once and for all, because the balance is not in your favour, he begs you to stay, in a tone of such desperation that you cannot deny him."
Lillian Roxon, Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock

City of Exaggerations

The Trump Building

"New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls."
Kurt Wenzel, Lit Life

New York Society

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir and Fifth Avenue

"I was deep in the world known oxymoronically known as 'New York society,' where the fish are bigger and the water is colder, or the fish are colder and the water is bigger, depending on your point of view."
Jane Stanton Hitchcock, Social Crimes

Where Good Things Happen

Chrysler Building

"New York isn't the only place where good things happen. But I don't think there's anywhere else where so many good things can happen at once, so unexpectedly, in such bizarre combinations."
Wayne Hoffman, Hard

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Lincoln Tunnel Ventilation Tower

"The reason New Yorkers are depressed is because the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey."
Garrison Keillor,  Pretty Good Joke Book