Americans

Fifth Avenue

"New York is not the same city it was, being now overrun with Americans."
Dawn Powell, quoted in Remarkable, Unspeakable New York

New York Rain

Grace Building

"New York rain is a rain of exile. Abundant, viscous and dense, it pours down tirelessly between the high cubes of cement into avenues plunged suddenly into the darkness of a well."
Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

Late-Night City

Eighth Avenue

"My New York was a late-night city, its streets occupied by prostitutes, taxi-cabs, roaming homosexuals, its parks trysting places, its ruined neighborhoods mere stage sets on which isolated figures appeared to fulfill my romantic dreams."
Andrew Holleran, Nights in Aruba

Becoming a New Yorker

New Yorker Hotel

"Becoming a New Yorker is a privilege not easily granted, but one that comes with years of diligence. One must be adept at Yiddish slang, Italian hand gestures, and Latin dance steps, suffer endless evenings of tedious off-Broadway plays, mind-numbing films with subtitles and decades of gut-wrenching knishes and spicy meatballs. But, the rewards are noble."
Clay Cole, Sh-Boom!

God Bless

Prayer station in the Lower East Side

"God bless New York City, my Big Apple Pie, Bless all them blarin' sirens that make my eardrums cry; Bless all them cabs on concrete slabs that'll kill me by-an'-by, Oh, God bless New York City, my Big Apple Pie."
James Dean Jay Byrd and Steven Cheslik-Demeyer, The Good Book

Rise of Dreams and Beauty

Manhattan skyline

"There is no thrill in all the world like that of entering, for the first time, New York harbor, — coming in from the flat monotony of the sea to this rise of dreams and beauty."
Langston Hughes, The Life of Langston Hughes

New York Women

Park Avenue

"Women in New York don't just dress. They don armor. Black is ubiquitous for a reason — it shields."
Katherine Lanpher, Leap Days

Nutcases

Manhattan Municipal Building

"This was New York City, where nutcases not only walked the streets freely but were elected to high office, hosted programs on TV, and ran the biggest and best institutions."
Teddy Hayes, Dead by Popular Demand

How to Survive in New York

One of "The Ostriches" by Peter Woytuk

"Survival in New York is part hawk, part ostrich: Notice everything, make eye contact with nothing. What you don't acknowledge can't hurt you."

Irene Marcuse, The Death Of An Amiable Child

Too Extreme

Mercer Street

"The first impression of New York is that it is too big, too rich, too dirty, and too poor. Everything is too extreme."
Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip

High Expectations

The High Line

"I like New York because it engenders high expectations simply by its pace."
Bill Bradley, Life on the Run

Type A

Park Avenue

"New York is a city that loves what has been called the "Type A" personality: always feeling the press of time, aggressive and competitive, a workaholic, dedicated to achievement."
Anthony Zito, New York City Insight Guide 

City of Rhythm

Citigroup Center

"New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm."
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin

Manahatta

East River

"More and more, too, the old name absorbs into me — MANNA-HATTA, "the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters." How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal!  how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!"
Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Prose Works 

New York LIving

Upper West Side

"An overpriced apartment and Chinese takeout: that's New York living."

Fisher (Hector Elizondo), Runaway Bride

Thousand Cities

Roosevelt Island and Manhattan

"New York is not a city. It is a thousand cities, each with its own life and spirit, all jampacked into an area of two hundred ninety-nine square miles."
Paul Crowell and A.H. Raskin, Our Fair City

Incestuous Island

Downtown

"Manhattan is a small incestuous island where everyone knows everyone else's dirty little secrets."
Judith Marks-White, Bachelor Degree

Splendid Desert

Midtown West

"It is a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where a stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race."
Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals

Parochial

Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory and Brooklyn Bridge

"New Yorkers are the most parochial people on earth. New York is it. Nothing else counts."
A.B.  Guthrie Jr, At the Field's End

Reality

New York Times Building

"If you become fatally a New Yorker and you have that heroin in your bloodstream, then when you leave New York, you feel a little unreal. It's not that New York is more real than other places, it's that it convinces you while you are in it that this is what reality is, that you are up against reality."
Phillip Lopate, quoted on PBS

The Skyline Effect

Manhattan seen from the Brooklyn Bridge

"You could not live with the Manhattan skyline so close at hand, so omnipresent and unignorable, and not feel a need to justify yourself."
Cai Emmons, The Stylist

A Real City

Katharine Hepburn Garden

"New York is that rarest of things: a real city. People work, live, and play in the same physical space, bringing the City alive at all hours of the day and night. There are no cloistered neighborhoods or gated communities. Supermodels strut the streets like common folk, and big stars take their kids to the neighborhood playgrounds and schools just like you, me, and the nanny up the block."
Ellen R. Shapiro, Relocating to New York City and Surrounding Areas

Not to Live In

The Bronx

"New York is not to live in, New York is to visit with a train that comes in and then goes out."
Ben Kamin, Remora

Advancing in New York

Riverside Park

"That was what surviving in New York was all about -- putting aside your personal feelings in favor of the possibility of advancing your position."
Candace Bushnell, Trading Up

The Back of the Bus

East 59th

"I've always favored New York 'cause this is one city where you don't have to ride in the back of the bus. Not that they're so liberal -- it's just that in New York, nobody moves to the back of the bus!"
Dick Gregory, From The Back of the Bus

World City

United Nations Building

"New York, like a great novel, transcends geographic boundaries or time. It is a world city, the ultimate marketplace. For those with talent, this city is the final test."
Ken Auletta, The Streets Were Paved with Gold

Big Time

Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower

"New York is the big time, the real place."
Elizabeth Nunez, Boundaries

Grand Central

Grand Central Terminal

"The city orbits around eight million
centers of the universe

and turns around the golden clock
at the still point of this place.

Lift up your eyes from the moving hive
and you will see time circling

under a vault of stars and know
just when and where you are."

Billy Collins, Grand Central