The Right to Call Yourself a New Yorker

The Brooklyn Bridge

"This is the greatest city in the world and you've to earn the right to call yourself a New Yorker."
Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), How I Met Your Mother

Fraud and Abomination

The Helmsley Building

"New York is a fraud and an abomination."
Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow: Letters

Outside World

The News Building

"The true New Yorker does not really seek information about the outside world. He feels that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting."
Aubrey Menen, quoted in The Epic of New York City

Young and Thin

Third Avenue

"New York keeps you young. It keeps you thin, just running after taxicabs and the eternal dollar."
Richard Mealand, Let Me Do the Talking

Feeling of Death

St. Paul's Churchyard

"Maybe New Yorkers like black because they feel like they've died."
Candace Bushnell, Summer and the City

Beauty

Macy's Flower Show

"To live in New York is to constantly consider what beauty is. You are surrounded by it and you are surrounded by people who presume to know it."
Katherine Lanpher, Leap Days

Guests from Hell

Madison Square Plaza

"New York City winters are like guests from hell who refuse to leave long after their welcome."
Joshua Halberstam, A Seat At The Table

Most Wicked City

Criminal Courts Building

"I asked myself a question. 'Brother Hall,' I said to myself, 'which is the most wicked city, pluperfect and parboiled, you've ever been in?' Without a bit of hesitation the answer came forth, 'New York, N.Y.' Consequently, I got on a train and came here and took root."
Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

Circus

Union Square

"Living in New York is comparable to living at a circus. Everywhere you look, performers are giving it their best shot in hopes their show is worthy of the coins jingling in your pocket."
Andy Ellwood, Forbes Magazine

Danger

The High Line

"I don't need to jump out of planes or scale mountains to put a little zest in my life. I can get that sort of thrill any time by walking the streets of New York without a Glock in my purse."
Joan Rivers, I Hate Everyone... Starting with Me

Alarm Clock

Flatiron Building and Fifth Avenue Clock

"To be a New Yorker is the opposite of 'laid back.' New Yorkers don't need caffeine to wake up — the city is their alarm."
Herbert London, The Broken Apple

Spring

West 42nd St.

"Spring in New York City is like a displaced person; desolate, forlorn, devoid of passion or joy. It arrives wearily in this city of concrete and bricks, finding practically no trees at all. Deeming the place inhospitable and barren, it departs hurriedly on its trek south without so much as a last lingering look."
Lin-chih Tsung, The Marginal Man

Radioactive Cloud

West 23rd

"The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry."
E.B. White, Here is New York

Central and Magnificent

Battery Park

"Like millions of iron filings, people stream to magnetic New York, and their mere presence in one place is a million-fold mutual confirmation: to be there is to have arrived somewhere central and magnificent."
Michele Landsberg, This is New York, Honey

Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow

St. Patrick's Day Parade

"In New York every rainbow has an empty pot of gold at the end with a chalk outline of a dead leprechaun."
Bob Sarlatte, The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners

Miracle

"New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light."
Melissa Febos, Whip Smart

Warmest Moment

"If the planet grows cold, this city will nevertheless have been mankind's warmest moment."
Paul Morand, quoted in New York: Civic Exploitation

Sights and Sounds

"But, ah! Manhattan's sights and sounds, her smells,
Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes
From being of her a part, her subtle spells,
Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums—
O God! the stark, unutterable pity,
To be dead, and never  behold my city."
James Weldon Johnson, Complete Poems

New York in the Heart

Manhattan and Queens

"You are thrilled by New York—I doubt you will be after five more years when you are more fully nourished from within. I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

Monologues

Cell phone antennas on East Houston

"New Yorkers love their answering machines because they circumvent the annoying business of having their fascinating monologues interrupted."
Dorian Yeager, Eviction by Death

Big

East 14th

"To be big somewhere else is nothing. To be big in New York is big."
Y.A. Tittle, quoted in Tales from the New York Giants Sideline

Chunk of Garlic

"In the 'Great American Melting Pot,' rural Ohio may be a lump of white flour that hasn't been stirred properly. Not that New York is any better. New York is that chunk of garlic that you bite into thinking it's potato and you can't get the taste out of your mouth all day. It all blends one you mix it, but sometimes you really have to grind it against the side."
Tina Fey, Bossypants

Slaves of New York

"Why doesn't everyone struggling in New York move here and start the revolution? It's like we're all slaves to this place that doesn't even really want us."
Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), Girls

Own Journey

"I miss the anonymity that comes with New York because everyone around you is so immersed in their own journey."
Jordana Brewster, T Magazine

Center of Sin

"New York is not just an amusement centre, but it is that, and much of its glamour and unpopularity in America is due to its reputation as a centre of sin."
D.W. Brogan, American Themes

States of Sanity

"New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection."
Muriel Spark, The Hothouse by the East River

Continual Training

Bryant Park

"New Yorkers are different. It's because of the way they live. They're accustomed to conditions of extreme physical closeness, where they're forever bouncing off each other. Also, their city is in some respects the capital of the world, and they feel this. Their opinion is that in order to live as they do, they have to stay in continual training, like athletes."
James Whorton, Frankland

Raw Humanity

"The great cities of the earth are so many alchemist's retorts into which are constantly pouring vast quantities of human raw materials, presently to emerge as finished products in infinite variety. Of these magic retorts New York is the greatest, because its receipts of raw humanity, domestic and foreign, are largest, and the wonders of transformations wrought in it by its powerful chemicals are the most marvelous."
David Graham Phillips, Old Wives For New

Rotten Villages

"New York is not even a city, it's a congerie of rotten villages."
James M. Cain, The Paris Review Interviews

Orgasmic City

Katz's Delicatessen

"Living in New York is like coming all the time."
Gene Simmons, More Sex Talk

Heart of Gold

East 23rd

"A New Yorker is a person who: works too hard, plays too hard, talks too loud, eats too much, and has a heart of gold, with earrings to match!"
Fran Drescher, New York Magazine