Heartbeat of the World

Third Avenue

"New York is the heartbeat of the world. It is the most extraordinary city. If you have a good idea or even a bad idea, you can make it happen in New York."
Kelsey Grammer, My City, My New York

Divorcée

"New York's not related to anywhere; it has no kith or kin on this continent. Everywhere else is like everywhere else. But New York is like a divorcée looking for a richer second country."
A.A. Gill, To America with Love

Only the Dead

"Only the dead know Brooklyn."
Thomas Wolfe, The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe

Artery

Broadway

"Broadway is a main artery of New York life — the hardened artery."
Walter Winchell, quoted in All Told

Third World Country

Drinking water sampling station

"Of all Third World countries, New York is my favorite. The natives are unfriendly, nothing really functions like it should, and the city smells bad, but at least you can drink the water and you don't need a visa to get home."
Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld

Quick Change

"Everything is always changing so quickly in New York City; if you go away for even a week you realize it: the Greek restaurant becomes an Ethiopian restaurant. The bakery has been transformed into yet another nail salon."
Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Caught in a Machine

"The average New Yorker is caught in a Machine. He whirls along, he is dizzy, he is helpless. If he resists, the Machine will mangle him. If he does not resist, it will daze him first with its glittering reiteration, so that when the mangling comes he is past knowing."
Waldo Frank, Our America

Autumn

"Autumn in New York, why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York, it spells the thrill of first-nighting.
Glittering crowds and shimmering clouds in canyons of steel;
they're making me feel: I’m home."
Vernon Duke, Autumn in New York

Brain Orgasms

Gantry Plaza

"When New York is good to you, it can give you 10,000 brain orgasms a day. It can you make you feel like your life is one of those terrible cheesy movies that secretly inspired you to move to the city."
Ryan O'Connell, Thought Catalog

Made

"New Yorkers are not born, they are made. As survivors of a cruel winnowing process, they are arrogantly certain that 'no other place is good enough' for them."
George J. Lankevich, New York City

Most Often Heard

Manhattan (Pixabay)

"Someone did a study of the three most often heard phrases in New York City. One is, 'Hey, taxi.' Two is, 'What train do I take to get to Bloomingdales?' And three is, 'Don't worry. It's just a flesh wound.' "
David Letterman, quoted in Uncle John's Third Bathroom Reader

Top of the Heap

432 Park Avenue

"'Big Apple' means the big time, the pinnacle of success, the top of the heap."
Vernon Boggs, Gerald Handel and Sylvia Fleis Fava, The Apple Sliced

Purpose

"Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of purpose; everyone's got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn't mean it's an unfriendly place—just busy and preoccupied."
Laura Anne Gilman, Pack of Lies

Losing Touch

"New York, like Boston, is too near London and Paris to be American. It is not in touch with the West. It is losing touch with the people."
Hamlin Garland, Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical

Of Comfort and Convenience

"New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience — if they did they would live elsewhere."
E.B. White, Here is New York

Intellectual Mecca

Central Park

"It's no wonder that New York is the intellectual mecca of America — New Yorkers never stop reading, no matter what happens. They ignore madmen, singing drunks, women in labor, and they don't even look up to watch a fight. Their ability to concentrate boggles the Southern mind. What, after all, could be more interesting than other people's business?"
Florence King, Southern Ladies & Gentlemen

Hollow Pit

Third Avenue

"New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness."
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Extraordinary is Commonplace

"Of all the marvels of man, New York deserves our attention, our study. Here is focused almost everything we should be proud of, and perhaps a little scared of, too: power, imagination, energy, competitiveness. It's a place where invariably even the extraordinary is commonplace."
George Plimpton, Cities

New York Sky

World Trade Center

"New York is nothing without its sky. Naked and immense, stretched to the four corners of the horizon, it gives the city its glorious mornings and the grandeur of its evenings."
Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

Shining City and Apocalyptic Inferno

One World Trade Center

"In America, New York is the shining city on the hill and the apocalyptic inferno. It's loved as the epitome of the cosmopolitan body politic but loathed for us dark hordes that flow through its veins. It's hailed as the paragon of elite high culture and feared for the graffiti-tagged walls that write back in wild styles. New York is the Gilded Age and the iron cage, the World Trade Center and the planes."
‎Sohail Daulatzai, Born to Use Mics

Strange Crowded Streets

Dumbo

"Though all the streets are crowded

There's somethin' strange about it
I lived there 'bout a year and I never once felt at home
I thought I'd make the big time
I learned a lot of lessons awful quick
And now I'm tellin' you that they were not the nice kind
It's been so long since I have felt fine
That's the reason that I've gotta get outta here
I'm so alone
Don't you know that I gotta get outta here
'Cause New York's not my home."
Jim Croce, New York's Not My Home

Last Frontier

Gantry Plaza

"New York is our last frontier, the place where persons of spirit are drawn as by a magnet."

Anselm L. Strauss, The American City

New York Crowd

"If you're in front of a New York crowd, and you go, 'Goddamn, this city is fucked up,' they all go, 'Oh yeah, we know! We live here!' You can never lose a New York crowd by going, 'Man, living in New York sucks.' They're like, 'Hey, get in line, asshole. You think we don't know that? We're in it for the long run.'"
Patton Oswalt, The Huffington Post

World Revolves

"When you live in New York, you think the world revolves around you."
Craig Heimbuch, Chasing Oliver Hazard Perry

Dream Come True

"Of all the things that have happened in my life, I'd say that living in New York is the closest thing to a dream coming true. I don't profess to really know America. I haven't even visited 'America' in any real sense. Back in Britain people ask me what America is like. I say, 'Well, I only really know L.A. and New York.' Then they ask me which I prefer. I tell them New York. Then they ask me what the difference is. I say, 'In New York, at least they stab you in the front.'"
Ricky Gervais, T Magazine

Urbane Familiarity

"In New York, then, you are met everywhere by a sort of urbane familiarity. The man who does you a service, for which you pay him, is neither civil nor uncivil. He contrives, in a way which is by no means unpleasant, to put himself on an equality with you."
Charles Whibley, American Sketches

Past, Present, Future

Donna Karan International Headquarters

"New York is what I stand for — the past, the present, the future."
Donna Karan, quoted in NBC New York

Sense of Community

6th Street Community Center

"If you think of the great cities of history, Athens is glory... Rome is grandeur, or power... Paris is culture. What is New York? New York is a home. New York's great gift to the world was that people from all over the world could come here, they could create their own communities, their own neighborhoods. So people felt a sense of community, a sense of belonging."
Robert Caro, Exchange Magazine

Something Tremendous

"You feel, in New York City, the energy coming up out of the sidewalks, you know that you are in the midst of something tremendous, and if something tremendous hasn't yet happened, it's just about to happen."
Brendan Gill, PBS

Small Place

"New York's a small place when it comes to the part of it that wakes up just as the rest is going to bed."
P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves