Junior High School

Junior High School

"If you think everything in New York is high class, like the inside of a yacht or something, it isn't. Sometimes it's just another hallway; sometimes it looks just like your junior high school."
Tim Federle, Better Nate Than Never

Intoxicating

"I love New York ... I think it's the best city in the world. As far as cities go, everything's there. I think it's so vibrant. I love the people, I think they're honest, in your face. If they don't like you, they'll say, 'Get out of my way,' if they like you they'll slap you on the back and support you. It's a very intoxicating environment to be in."
Hugh Jackman, IGN

Iron Dragon

Manhattan skyline and Williamsburg Bridge

"There, gaping before us, were the jaws of the iron dragon: the immense New York metropolis."
Bernardo Vega, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega

Communal Life

East 9th

"To live in New York is to be involved with the outer or communal life of the city in all its detail, to be in the face of everyone else looking at you (but giving you license to be eccentric), particular people doing particular things, amid detail of objects, architecture, weather. Everyone is interested in everything."
Alice Notley, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

Tempo

Met Life Tower

"Your mother has always wondered why I live in New York. I live here because of the tempo and the fast track, because there are always so many more choices. I live here because it ruins you for any other place. You'll see."
Jean Bach, The New Yorker

Mysterious Association

Dumbo

"New York is also, significantly, a metropolis made up of groups, and its inhabitants are more sociable than might at first be thought. You can feel this walking around the streets, hanging about the cafés, and even descending into the depths of  the subway: you are on your own—at times acutely so—but in constant, mysterious association with others."
Mario Maffi, New York City: An Outsider's Inside View

Playful

Lego  on Flatiron Plaza

"One of the reasons why I liked living in Manhattan was that the city would share your mood the moment you walked out the door. If you were in a hurry, everything else was too, even the pigeons. You shared the same speed and sense of urgency to get wherever you were going.
When you had time to kill, it was happy to give you things to look at and do that easily took up whole days. I didn't agree with people who said Manhattan was a cold, indifferent town. Sure it was gruff, but it was also playful and sometimes very funny."
Jonathan Carroll, The Marriage of Sticks

Constant Change

New Whitney Museum of American Art

"For New York City, normality is a state of constant change."
Marcia Reiss, New York Then and Now

Bystander

"Never a day passes in New York, without some innocent bystander being shot. You just stand around this town long enough, and be innocent, and somebody is going to shoot you."
Will Rogers, Will Rogers at the Ziegfield Follies

Story of America

Trump International Hotel and Tower

"My personal favorite is the New York skyline—the big, brassy picture that comes to the minds of people all over the world when you mention America. From the Statue of Liberty to the World Trade Center to the Empire State Building, the buildings of New York tell the story of our country—the American Dream in stone and glass."
Donald Trump, The America We Deserve

Pure Beauty

Conservatory Garden

"New York is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty."
Pete Hamill, Downtown

Strange Summer

Park Avenue South during Summer Streets

"New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it's not, it's like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they're one step removed from it."
Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Icing on the Pie

Chrysler Building

"It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization."
H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy

Trial by Torture

"Now there may be people who move easily into New York without travail, but most I have talked to about it have had some kind of trial by torture before acceptance. And the acceptance is a double thing. It seems to me that the city finally accepts you just as you finally accept the city."
John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

Me Town

Diane von Furstenberg Studio headquarters

"New York is a me town, and the most important New Yorker is each one of them. Everyone is striving for their own survival ... because New York is so intense and can be so hard."
Diane Von Furstenberg, New York Magazine

Manhattan Living

Morningside Heights

"To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid."
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City

El Dorado

Grand Army Plaza

"Dear delightful New York is the El Dorado of heroes, visionaries, fortune hunters, loafers, Jeremy Diddlers, disconsolate authors, and all other interesting characters, ad infinitum."
John M. Moore, The Adventures of Tom Stapleton

Newness

The corner of New and Wall streets

"The newness of New York — unlike even that of Boston, I seemed to discern — had this mark of its very own, that it affects one, in every case, as having treated itself as still more provisional, if possible, than any poor dear little interest of antiquity it may have annihilated"
Henry James, The American Scene

Own Way

FDR Drive

"It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty."
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady

New York Speech

"Because New York speech is some of the speediest English on the planet, I'd say the first challenge for a New York newcomer would be simply distinguishing where one word ends and the next begins."
Charles Harrington Elster, What in the Word? Wordplay, Word Lore, and Answers to Your Peskiest Questions about Language 

Lady of the Evening

"Broadway is a lady of the evening. In the sunlight she looks like a suddenly awakened chorus girl who went to bed with her make-up on."
C.V.R. Thompson, I Lost My English Accent

Deepest City

"Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my
City of Cities float
In sunset's golden and crimson dyes: I look and
a great joy clutches my throat!
Plateau of roofs by canyons crossed: windows by
thousands fire-furled--
O gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City
of the World!"
James Oppenheim, "New York, from a Skyscraper," Monday Morning, and Other Poems

New York Rats

"The rats of New York are quicker-witted than those on farms, and they can outthink any man who has not made a study of their habits."
Joseph Mitchell, The Bottom of the Harbor

Speedier New York

"There is nothing relaxed about the summer city. New York's noise is louder, New York's toughness is brasher, New York's velocity is speedier. Everything — stores, offices, schedules, vacations, traffic — demands full steam ahead."
Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary

European

Alwyn Court

"There is plenty of money around, and money makes men bold. Self-satisfied, self-centered and self-important. New York, I realize, has gone European."
Charlie LeDuff, US Guys

Senses

"We may well point the finger of scorn at those who taunt us with being devoted to the gratification of our senses. New York devoted to the senses! Why, it is not even courteous to the senses: it does not so much as hold its nose!"
Josiah Gilbert Holland, Every-day Topics, A Book of Briefs

Contagious Beginnings

Central Park

"Now it's always once upon a time
In New York City
It's a big old, bad old, tough old town, it's true
But beginnings are contagious there
They're always setting stages there
They're always turning pages there for you."
Barry Mann and Howard Ashman, Once Upon a Time in New York City

America at High Volume

Park Avenue

"New York is like America with the volume turned up to 10."
Rocky Carroll, Vibe Magazine

Stand-In

West 113th St.

"New York is the stand-in, the ersatz of all the things I can remember and cannot have, and may not even want, much less love, but continue to look for."
André Aciman, False Papers

Endless Marvels

Brooklyn Museum

"There's no better place on earth to live than New York City. It has the best museums, theaters, and nightclubs, the best variety shows, burlesques, and live-music venues, and the very finest in world cuisine. Its winestock alone makes of the Roman empire a sad Kansan backwater. The marvels are endless. But who has time to partake of the marvels when you're busy busting your ass to stay solvent in New York?
Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Pioneer and Puritan

"Pioneer and Puritan and Industrialist have made New York. And like the sky, Joy has been shadowed out."
Waldo Frank, Our America