New Year's Eve in Times Square

New Year's Eve Centennial Ball

"There are only two circumstances where a dropping ball can qualify as a noteworthy event: male adolescence and New Year's Eve in Times Square. Having had no personal experience with the first, I will instead skip to the second and say that if you value your sanity, your extremities, and your bladder, you should find a different place to celebrate the new year."

Catherine Price, 101 Places Not to See Before You Die

Innocence

Grand Army Plaza

"The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes."
Pete Hamill, Downtown

Triumph

"Triumph of the Human Spirit" by Lorenzo Pace

"The very act of residing in New York represents risk. To persist, to remain, is a sign of endurance, and a kind of triumph."
Gay Talese, New York Magazine

Where Grownups Live

Washington Street

"As a child, I read Vogue magazine and plotted to live in New York. New York, I thought, was where the grownups live. I still think that."
Julia Cameron, The Sound of Paper

Myth

Chrysler Building

"Right or wrong New York represents a place where, more than anywhere, nothing is natural any more, where everything is constantly transformed into myth."
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet

A Place for Young Adventurers

Hostelling International New York

"New York is the great place for young adventurers. You can roam around, see incredibly weird things, be grossed out, learn the lingo, be glamorous in ways impossible back home, and have sex with anybody you like and be secret about it."
Garrison Keillor, Wobegon Boy

Fantasy

Sixth Avenue

"Christmas in New York is like a fantasy! This is the best time of year to be here."
Melanie Schuster, Picture Perfect Christmas

Christmas Eve

Sixth Avenue

"For me, every day in New York City was like Christmas Eve, filled with the anticipation of gifts waiting to be opened and a feast to be consumed."
Steven Sorrentino, Luncheonette

Cost of Living

Meatpacking District

"It's good I live in New York, because just food and rent take up all my income. If we lived somewhere else I wonder what I'd spend it on. I mean in New York it costs a lot of money to be satisfied with so little."
Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision

Heaven and Hell

Midtown

"If you love him
Send him to New York,
'Cause that's where Heaven is.
If you hate him
Send him to New York,
'Cause that's where Hell is."
Glen Cao, Beijinger in New York

Work of Art

Liz Christy Garden

"New York is a work of art, a complete work of art."
Marcel Duchamp, The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism

Shoebox Apartments

Harlem

"As fabulous as Manhattan is, the food, the celeb sightings, the shopping, it's also one of the most ludicrously expensive cities in the world. This means a majority of its inhabitants are forced to squeeze their entire lives into tiny shoebox apartments that anywhere else in the country would not be deemed large enough to house the family pet."
Christine Coppa, Rattled!

Lethal Relationship

"River Gazers" by Elizabeth Allison

"New York is killing me, but I can't live without it."
Lillian Roxon, quoted in Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock

Eyes in the Back of the Head

Times Square

"I like it here in New York. I like the idea of having to keep eyes in the back of your head all the time."
John Cale, Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day 2004

Air Pockets

Conservatory Garden

"There is so much action in New York one is sometimes perversely excited by those places where you are not part of it. Where nothing is happening. These places, in turn, become little air pockets of possibility."
Thomas Beller, Central Park: An Anthology

Like a Woman

"Venus de Milo" by Jim Dine

"New York is like a woman, with its sudden, irrational changes of climate, insufferable and hugely welcome at the same time."
Kritin McCloy, Hollywood Savage

The Richest Man

740 Park Avenue

"The very richest man, in New York, is never quite sure that the house he lives in now will be his next year — that he will be able to resist the constant pressure of business expansion and rising land values."
H.L. Mencken, Prejudices

New York Insults

North Williamsburg

"All men in New York insult you — there seem to be no exceptions. There are exceptions of course — have been — but they are probably dead."
Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

Creating, Hoping, Trying

Lafayette St.

"Perhaps, someday, New York City will collapse under its own ambitions, its own dreams and excesses, but until then it will never stop creating, hoping, trying."
Van Dinh Tran, Blue Dragon, White Tiger

Surrogate City

Surrogate's Court

"New York is my home precisely because it is a place from which I can begin to be elsewhere—an analogue city, a surrogate city, a shadow city that allows me to naturalize and neutralize this terrifying, devastating, unlivable megalopolis by letting me think it is something else, somewhere else, that it is indeed far smaller, quainter than I feared."
André Aciman, False Papers

New York's Finest

Columbus Circle

"I'm a New York City cop, Miss Van Veen. I'm highly trained for crazy."
Det. Hayden Cooper (Teddy Sears), 666 Park Avenue

Congenial to Exiles

Staten Island Ferry

"There is something about New York that is eternally congenial to exiles. Those who have been aloft too long soon sense that here they can land."
Alfred Kazin, Our New York

The City That Never Sleeps

West Chelsea

"New Yorkers take pride in living in the city that never sleeps—unfortunately, it's also the city that never showers, brushes its teeth, or has good aim when it pees."
Bill Maher, Does Anybody Have a Problem with That?

Creative Atmosphere

Strawberry Fields

"New York is a fantastic place; there's an unbelievably creative atmosphere on this little island of Manhattan."
John Lennon, John Lennon: One Day at a Time

No Saint in the City

St. Luke's School

"I can tell you I have lived here all my life and it is almost impossible to be a saint in this city."
Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck), Blue Bloods

Productive Isolation

Brooklyn Heights

"New York is the best place to work because the isolation of New York is better than anywhere else."
Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel: Conversations

Polished

"Moonbird" by Joan Miró

"New York is a place that can grind you down and spit you out. A true New Yorker doesn't get ground down, he gets polished."
Kurt, Braunohler, quoted in New York Magazine

No Law

Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State

"This is New York, and there's no law against being annoying."
William Kunstler, William M. Kunstler

A Different Country

Ford Foundation

"New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, acts differently. They just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is."
Henry Ford, quoted in 1001 Insults, Put-Downs, & Comebacks

Concrete Whore

The High Line

"New York's a big old tired concrete whore that lays waiting to be fucked, never giving a fair price to anyone."
Arty Nelson, Technicolor Pulp

Little New York

Subway seats

"I'm too big for New York, okay? I'm always trying to fit into cramped little subway seats, or duck under doorways that were built a hundred and fifty years ago. Hey, guess what, people are bigger now! Build bigger doorways! What the hell is the matter with you?"
Marshall Erikson (Jason Segel), How I Met Your Mother