Glittering People

"New York is filled with glittering people who play with vomit."
Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

Late May

Big Screen Plaza

"It was one of those late May evenings when New York seems to both hug you and summon you on toward some reward to be found in that city and nowhere else."
Howell Raines, The One that Got Away

Shaquille O'Neal

"Living in Brooklyn is like being in a locker room with Shaquille O'Neal. You can't help but stare."
Jonathan Ames, I Love You More than You Know

If New York Didn't Exist

Carlton Arms Hotel

"If New York didn't exist, I'd have to create it."
Viktor Koen, Weird Tales 351

Dinosaurs

American Museum of Natural History (Wikimedia Commons)

"Thanks to movies and TV, magazines, the news, books — iconography in general — all of us, even natives, carry a mental suitcase stuffed with received images of the Big Apple. That’s true of children, too, for whom the city’s superlatives (biggest, loudest, tallest) hold a special fascination. You might even say that New York is to other American cities what dinosaurs are to other animals — minus, one hopes, the extinction event."
Bruce Handy, The New York Times

Addiction and Withdrawal

Needle Disposal Box in the Lower East Side

"New York City is like a drug
Once you are introduced
You become addicted
If you are away for too long
Withdrawals commence
And when you get too much of it...
It beats the shit out of you
Until you detoxify
And start all over again."
Elliot Torres, Undaunted

Brain and Capital

"New York, Enemy of the Merely Picturesque, Headquarters of Misery and Marvel, Eraser and Renewer, Brain and Capital of the Continent!"
Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary

Modest

Baruch Houses

"New Yorkers are modest. It is a distinction for a child in New York to be the brightest on one block; he acquires no exaggerated idea of his own relative intelligence. Prairie geniuses are raced in cheap company when young. They are  intoxicated by the feel of being boy wonders in Amarillo, and when they bounce off New York's skin as adults they resent it."
A.J. Liebling, The Best of A.J. Liebling

All Lit Up

"Once you're on the bridge and moving towards Manhattan the skyline dominates, and it's almost as if the buildings are people,  jammed shoulder to shoulder, rushing toward midtown, thinning out, and then congregating again downtown around Wall Street and Battery Park. They're all lit up, like they've got someplace special to be and they've put on their finest clothes. They know that everyone is looking at them,but they've grown accustomed to that kind of attention, and besides, those little people can look, but they can't really touch."
Andrea Giovino, Divorced from the Mob

Dead Meat

Meatpacking District

"Returning from the Midwest to New York is like driving full speed into a wall. The city slams you. Middle America is all about drift and suspension. It's the pervasiveness of the mall-culture mentality; all of life becomes an aimless wafting on currents of synthesized sound, through the well- conditioned air. In New York, you walk down the streets like that, you're dead meat."
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

Come Through

"If you’re a little bitch and you come from somewhere else and try to live in New York, you’re not a New Yorker. But if you come through and you thug it out and you’re a real person, then you can be a New Yorker."
Action Bronson, New York Magazine

Crazy Streak

Williamsburg

"All New Yorkers are crazy — either good crazy or crazy crazy. It doesn't matter if they got here last week or are sixth-generation locals, they all possess that crazy streak."

David Davidar, Ithaca

Streets are Paved with Diamonds

Diamond District

"Cause everyone's your friend in New York City
And everything looks beautiful when you're young and pretty
The streets are paved with diamonds and there's just so much to see
But the best thing about New York City is you and me."
They Might Be Giants, New York City

24-Hour Hustle

"New York, New York, was a giant urban terrain of twenty-four-hour hustle. New Yorkers hustled even while they slept."
Omar Tyree, Diary of a Groupie

After the Rain

Bernard Baruch Way

"It rained earlier in the day and now, at one in the afternoon, for a minute and a half, New York is washed clean. The streets glitter in the pale spring sunlight. Cars radiate dust-free happiness. Storefront windows sparkle mindlessly. Even people look made anew."

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

Nexus of the Universe

East Village

"I'm at the corner of first and first. Wait a minute. How can the same street intersect with itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe!"
Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards), Seinfeld

New York in the Fog

Helen Keller at Madame Tussauds

"New York has a special interest for me when it is wrapped in fog. Then it behaves very much like a blind person."
Helen Keller, quoted in Writing New York

Doing It Wrong

Sign in Brooklyn Heights

"In New York, whatever you're doing, you're probably not doing it very well. If you're writing something, your first draft isn't very good and you'd better do it again. Your apartment is okay for now, but don't stop looking for a bigger one. Your summer house is in the wrong part of whatever part it's in. So is the part in your hair. Your friends aren't as nice as my friends. Your life isn't as good as my life. And my life is pretty lousy. Who needs New York?"
David Blum, New York Magazine

Extremes

Empire State Building (Pixabay)

 "New York is very much as I remember. Everything is too: The buildings are too high. the clothing too fashionable, the women too beautiful, the rich too rich, and the poor far too poor. Is it any wonder that, living as I do a life of extremes. I should so love a city that often seems all one way or all another?"
Gerald Kolpan, Etta

Survival Instinct

East River

"New Yorkers are very wary, an instinct that has always been necessary for survival, now more than ever."
Megan McCafferty, Charmed Thirds

Everything but the Will to Leave

Holland Tunnel

"I do not say that everything in New York is good. I say only that there is no good thing in the world that you cannot get in New York. You can get everything in New York except the desire to go anywhere else to live."
Ashbel P. Fitch, Year Book of the Holland Society of New York

Fourth Birthday

Who knew people had so much to say about New York? When we started this blog, we worried we might eventually run out of quotes, but we needn't have. It turns out that everyone --authors, celebrities, politicians, movie and television characters-- has something to say about the greatest city in the world. Thanks for accompanying us for these past four years and please, stick around.

Tomorrow we'll be back with a new quote but on our birthday, as it has become tradition, we look back and bring you our ten favorite quotes from the past year. What's your favorite?

10. "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

9. "New York was that kind of place: it made you feel like you could do anything or be anyone."
Tess Daly, It's Up to You, New York

8. "New Yorkers can't settle down anywhere else in the world because they just naturally have a quicker pace. You get out of the bed faster in New York."
Al Sharpton, quoted in New York Magazine

7. "London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something particularly good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it."
Dorothy Parker, quoted in The New York Times

6. "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

5. "Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world's in New York."
Oriana Fallaci, Penelope at War

4. "It is impossible to enter New York without feeling that something wonderful is about to happen. Whether you arrive by plane, ship, train, car or bus, bridge or tunnel, you feel the immediate excitement of starshine."
Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress

3. "New York is where you go to seize the day, to leave your mark, to live within the nerve of your generation."
Cynthia Ozick, The Best American Essays 2000

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

1. "I wake up every morning and say to myself, 'Well, I'm still in New York. Thank you, God.'"
Ed Koch, Vanity Fair

Spaceship

Sixth Avenue

"New York! It is stupendous, an immense spaceship set loose in the cosmos, without roots, depth, but suspended over an infinite crystal plate. Nineveh, Venice, Damascus, Mars, Benares, all the cities of the world fused together in a brilliant set, futuristic and decadent."
Federico Fellini, Federico Fellini

Foodie Paradise

Food truck

"New York City is a foodie paradise, like a culinary Sodom and Gomorrah."
Sherri Shepherd, Permission Slips

Number Talk

Stock ticker at the Morgan Stanley headquarters

"The worst thing about New York: the fact that everybody talks in numbers. No one talks in words."
Harold Evans, New York Magazine

Inspiring Lights

Alicia Keys at Madame Tussauds

"These streets will make you feel brand new,
the lights will inspire you,
Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York."
Alicia Keys, Empire State of Mind

Incredible Parties

Cipriani

"That's New York for you — a fabulous woman who gives incredible parties. You're never invited, but you know they're there, and you know that once you get inside it's going to be great."
George C. Wolfe, New York Magazine

One by One

Brooklyn Bridge

"You can do what you want in New York. You can start a business and people will let you live. In a small town, if they don't like you they'll figure a way to keep you out. In New York, you take people one by one."
Bradley Cunningham, quoted in The New Yorker

Manikins

Pete's Tavern

"He said to himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs."
O. Henry, The Trimmed Lamp

Always in a Rush

Third Avenue

"It doesn’t matter where you're going, New Yorkers always look like we’re in a rush. And every New Yorker feels this, for example, I was on a city bus once when a guy was taking too long to pay his fare--at the moment, a homeless guy on the bus yelled out: 'C’mon, I have got things to do!'"
Dean Obeidallah, The Dean's Report

Celebrities in New York

Katharine Hepburn Garden

"That's the difference between New York and the rest of the world. People here are just as celebrity-crazed as anywhere, but New Yorkers --or at least the ones who consider themselves sophisticates and loiter along the kind of Soho block I'm standing on now-- put on this pretense that they don't care, even as they stare out from their three-hundred-dollar shades."
Gayle Forman, Where She Went