Skyscrapers

Rob Young  / Wikicommons

"The skyscrapers of the city were a collection of hard-ons zeroing in on Brooklyn."
Joe Flaherty, Tin Wife

What New York Cares For

Temperance Fountain in Union Square

"In the great American metropolis a man is gauged by himself, not by his ancestors nor their achievements. No one cares much for the past: that is 'ancient history.' Nor is much regard paid to a possible though distant future: that is 'imagination.' What New York Cares for is the present."
Thomas N. Doutney, Thomas N. Doutney: His Life-struggle, Fall, and Reformation

In Love with New York City

Cosby Street

"Ah! some love Paris,
And some Purdue.
But love is an archer with a low I.Q.
A bold, bad bowman, and innocent of pity.
So I'm in love with New York City."
Phyllis McGinley, "A Kind of Love Letter to New York"

Family

Kips Bay

"The best thing about New York? That's easy -- it's New York people. They are like a family that doesn't always agree but that comes together in a staunch mass when anyone challenges the rights of New York."
Marvin Traub, New York Magazine

Crowded

"New York is so crowded that sex turns into a spectator sport."
David McGlynn, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said About New York

Lobster

"Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that nothing of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take offence. We would call nobody a lobster with good and sufficient claws."
O. Henry, Between Rounds

Dawn in New York

Morningside Park

"Dawn in New York whimpers
down the huge stairs
seeking in the chaff
flowers of sketched anguish."
Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York

Potential

Fifth Avenue

"New York will be a great city if they ever get it built."
James McCourt, Lasting City

Heartbeat

Central Park

"New York is my favorite American city. There's such an excitement here, you can almost hear its heartbeat."
Cathie Linz, The Marine & The Princess

Solid Rock

West 114th Street

"New York is a piece of rock. It's solid rock that I think is informed with some kind of strange energy that makes crazy people do great things."
Kelsey Grammer, My City, My New York

Monstrous Hive

Financial District

"To live in New York is to inhabit the cell of a monstrous hive."
John Ash, Disbelief

Skyline

"I have never ever looked at the New York skyline and taken it for granted. Whenever I drive over the Triborough Bridge, every time I see it, I think, 'How cool is that.'"
Hal Rubenstein, My City, My New York

New York Slide

"I first observed a phenomenon I now call the "New York Slide": you offer your words to try to communicate and connect with someone, but your words just hit a brick wall the person has erected to ward off human contact- the words slide down it and roll away."
Kelly Cutrone, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside

Group Therapy

Central Park

"New York is the world's most successful example of group therapy."
Robert Zimmerman quoted in 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said About New York

Waking Up in New York

Credit: Jeff Turner / Wikicommons

"Waking up in New York makes me feel like a tough little girl who has just fallen deeply in love and likes it."
John Edward Allen, Newspaper Makeup

Inauthenticity

"New York is the home of con artists. It's also the home of the self-invented, the fulfillers of the American dream. But, in New York, cons and success stories are impossible to tell apart, depending on how you look at  them, or when. Everyone is working it, fronting, faking it, so much so that there's an assumption of in-authenticity about everyone."
Amy Gray, Spygirl

Manhattan Women

Central Park

"Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren’t immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday."
Marisha Pessl, Night Film

Small Town

"People who say that New York is a big city make me laugh. When you live in New York, you're living in a small town — the one bounded by the shops, the movie houses, the friends of your  neighborhood. So I lived in the small town of the Upper West Side."
Quentin Reynolds, I, Willie Sutton

Understanding New York

Long Island City

"As soon as you feel you understand New York, an unpalatable fact becomes apparent: your understanding is obsolete."
John Gattuso, The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom

Park Avenue

Park Avenue

"Manhattan suffers its shocks. The neighborhoods turn over. The city changes in your sleep. But Park Avenue stays Park Avenue, for better or worse—moneyed, residential, quintessentially New York."
Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Fast-Forward

Damian Brandon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

"Nothing in New York City seems to move slowly enough to be brought into focus—walking the streets and avenues of this town, there's a distinctive feeling that everything's caught in fast-forward."
Elizabeth M. Rees, Demigods and Monsters

New York Noise

"It was one part of New York living he never got used to, the noise. For some it became background they could tune out. Not for him. It challenged him in the day when he wrote, and he never got an unbroken night's sleep because this was the city that never did."
Richard Castle, Naked Heat

Fixer

"If you want your boobs fixed, you go to LA. If you want your head fixed, you go to New York."
Ali Wentworth, Ali in Wonderland

Gun Owner

NBA store

"I love New York City. I've got a gun."
Charles Barkley, Sir Charles

Feel This Thing

"When I'm in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I'm in a movie."
Ryan Adams, SPIN

Excess and Hedonism

"This is what New York is all about --excess and hedonism-- and it's our job to put up with it."
Shallon Lester, Exes and Ohs

The City

Entrance to the PATH train

"To those of us who grew up not in it but next to it, in its shadow, a short train ride away on the Long Island Rail Road or the PATH or Metro North, New York is the city. As if there are no others. And for the rest of our lives, our relationship to cities will be defined by New York."
Lauren Elkin, Goodbye to All That

The Thought of New York

"The slightest thought of it enchants him — the buildings so tall, the sidewalks so wide, the streets laid out in perfect rectangles so that no one could ever get lost or disappear into them, the blocks of buildings divided into neat columns and rows like a case of eggs. What fools the Dutch were to lose that little island, that case of gleaming eggs, brimming with people's eager lives just about to hatch!"
Dara Horn, In the Image

Suffering

"Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer."
Donna Summer, quoted in Black Los Angeles

Yin and Yang

"New York's like the beady eye of yang at the center of the Midwest's unentitled, self-effacing plains of yin."
Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away