New Year's

"New Yorkers have long responded to New Year's as if a cinematic plague is about to descend and it's time to a) leave or b) stock up on batteries/water/the-complete-first-season-of-everything."
Sloane Crosley, The New York Times

Rikers Island

"New York is like an Island, a big Rikers Island
The cops be out wilding, all I hear is sirens
It's all about surviving, same old two-step
Try to stay alive when they be out robbing."
Nas, The Don

New York Pride

Long Island City

"Some people are proud of where they are from; New Yorkers are proud of where they have chosen to live."
Ricky Gervais, Time Out New York

New York Citizen

NYPL in Chelsea

"I was at the library today. The guys are very rude. I said, 'I'd like a card.' He says, 'You have to prove you're a citizen of New York.' So I stabbed him."
Emo Philips, quoted in Man Walks into a Bar

Where to Live

Soho

"You can live wherever you want—as long as people think you live in New York."

Benita Valente, The New York Times Magazine

Today

St. George's Church

"New York is so today, it becomes yesterday too fast."
Giancarlo Giammetti, quoted in Thing of Beauty

Christmas Spirit

Christmas decorations at the New York Public Library

"They really have the Christmas spirit in New York. I was in the subway and a sign said: MERRY NO SMOKING AND SPITTING."
Robert Orben, 2100 Laughs for All Occasions

Bright and Gay

Rockefeller Center

"We arrived in New York, by rail, the day before Christmas. Everything looked bright and gay in our streets. It seemed to me that the sky was clearer, the air more refreshing, and the sunlight more brilliant than in any other land!"
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminescences 

Surprising

Astor Place

"If we think of choosing a city to live in as a kind of marriage, then New York is the partner who can always surprise you."
Sarah Hepola, As Cold as Ice

Old World

Park Avenue

"New York looks a bit backwards, toward the Old World, rather than resolutely forwards. New Yorkers may think they're on some cutting edge, but that's not especially true. It is, however, the most exciting heterogeneous mess of a town I've ever seen."
Carter Burwell, Soundtrack

New York Things

"There are two things in New York, euphoria and disaster."
Bill Parcells, quoted in Forbes

Theory

"As New Yorkers, we generate new theories about the city on a monthly basis. My current theory is that New York doesn’t really exist. That it's not actually a physical place; it's just a bunch of ideas crammed together."
Christopher Bollen, The Rumpus

Poison

West 23rd Street

"New York is a bastard. New York is a bitch. New York is poison. New York values competition over community. New York is about making money, not making friends. In New York everybody lives in an unreal world where you are a star and no one else exists."
Don Shewey, Sam Shepherd

Different Galaxy

"Dusk Space" at the South Street Seaport

"The thing about New York is you can never get used to it. You go three blocks from wherever you are, and you're in a different galaxy."

Richard Price, The New York Times

Sensory Explosion

East 42nd

"New York is such a sensory explosion, visually, mentally. It's so much to absorb. So many different people, so many different walks of life."

Trevor Noah, The Wall Street Journal

Act of Faith

Greenwich Street

"Maybe what she saw in those women wasn't entitlement, maybe all it is really is an act of faith. Which in New York even stepping out onto the street is, technically."
Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Night and Day

"All cities are superb at night because their hideous corners are devoured in dark­ness. But Manhattan can sur­vive the daylight test. By day, it has the bizarre beauty of something that could not be imagined if the energy of a working community had not created it out of necessity."
Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Siamese Twins

"I'm one with New York and New York is one with me. I grew up there; there's no escaping it. We're like Siamese twins, if you separate us, I'll die."
Adrian Grenier, RTE

New York Cathedrals

Museum of American Finance

"New York is a city of museums: together with the banks, they are its real cathedrals, its true places of worship."
Mario Maffi, New York City: An Outsider's Inside View

All of Everything

"All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than any place else."
John Steinbeck, America and Americans

Power

Manhattan Municipal Building

"Before it is anything else, New York is a city of power, a place where the ability to assert one's will becomes the ultimate level of human achievement. Money counts, physical attractiveness remains a significant asset, but the acquisition and use of power is the name of The City's game."
Clayton Riley, Ebony

Vanilla

McDonald's in Harlem

"It feels like New York is getting more vanilla at a higher frequency. I know people like to talk at length about the 'good old days,' but to me the changing of New York is in a way totally disorienting. Just as I grasp to feel like I’m a part of something special, creative or artistic, it becomes another pub, or worse, chain store."
Lori Zimmer, Art Nerd

Friendliest

Brooklyn Bridge Park

"New York is the friendliest place. Not everybody knows that."
Diane Lane, The New York Times

Leave of Absence

Roosevelt Island

"New York is full of people on this kind of leave of absence, of people with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony."
Joan Didion, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions

Island

NYC ferry

"Manhattan is an island. Of course, everyone knows that, but it's so smooshed with buildings and people and police sirens and street fairs and restaurants that it's easy to forget it. You think it's the center of the universe when you're in it. From the boat, though, you can't believe how puny it all is."
Ellen Potter, Slob

Make Good

"Going into New York from some other city is not like, we'll say, going from St. Louis to Cincinnati. New York is like no other city... The psychology of New York is entirely different... You've got to make good!"
Miller Huggins, The Colonel and Hug

Humble Pie

"New York is different though. Living here basically entails being humiliated on a daily basis. It's like being served a slice of humble pie over and over. So even if you do develop an ego and start to think you're the shit, there will always be something waiting to bring you back down to Earth."
Ryan O'Connell, Thought Catalog

Real People

Fifth Avenue

"I am incredibly excited by the city. Really thrilled by it. The spontaneity of not knowing what each day will bring. You can walk out and grab a cup of coffee and realize you're just out for the entire day. You actually exist with real people. I love it."
Emily Blunt, The Guardian

Wild Growth

Manhattan skyline

"What I love about New York is that it just grew up wildly. Everyone tried to make a bigger building than the guy before him, there was no design, it just happened.''

Rudy Burckhardt, Talking Pictures

Primal Planet

"Sea of Light" at the South Street Seaport

"I knew New York intimately. And yet I didn't know it at all because New York is always in the process of being rebuilt. The city constantly shifts under our feet. It's like a primal planet with lava flows and storms and cacophonous noises."
Erica Jong, Fear of Dying

Horror Museum

Williamsburg

"Growing up in New York is like living in a horror museum because there are so many strange people walking the streets and riding the subways. You learn to develop a tough front if you live here, just in case you get into any kind of trouble and you need to talk your way out of it."
Christopher Walken, Christopher Walken A to Z

The City That Sleeps Around

Mattress store on Lexington Avenue

"New York may be the city that never sleeps, but it sure does sleep around."
Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), Jessica Jones

Sentiment

"I came to love New York; I had a sentiment about the people, the business, the politics, and the streets of the great city which cared neither for me nor for itself."
Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens

Transcendence

Coney Island pier

"New York was about wanting, about waiting for moments of transcendence that never quite happened."

Pagan Kennedy, Dwell

City on the Hill

"For me, Manhattan is the city on the hill. The place where dreams are made."
Soledad O'Brien, The Next Big Story

New York Heart

"New York, to that tall skyline, I come
Flying in from London to your door
New York, looking down on Central Park
Where they say you should not wander after dark

New York, like a scene from all those movies
But you're real enough to me
For there's a heart
A heart that lives in New York."

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, A Heart in New York

Money Getting

Columbia Business School

"The general aspect of New York is unquestionably pleasing. It is full, even to overflow, of business and bustle, and crowded with a population devoting their whole energies, to the arts of money-getting."
Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America

Beverly Hills

Washington Mews

"People who live in Brooklyn can now rightfully snicker at people who live in Manhattan. To them, Manhattan is like Beverly Hills now. Like, 'oh, you live in Manhattan, you live in the village, how quaint'. And Queens is next, and the Bronx is next."
Alec Baldwin, WWD

Social Fluidity

Morningside Heights

"There isn't a neighborhood in New York that is free of the poor, the raffish, the unwanted. Social fluidity in the city means no one gets away from no one."
Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level

Real Estate Dream

Riverside Drive

"A lot of New Yorkers have this dream where they open a cabinet and find a room they didn't know they had, or look under the sink and find a garage."
Camryn Manheim, The New York Times

Leave and Come Back

Harlem-125th Metro-North Station

"New York is the kind of city you love to leave and you love to come back to."
Philip Carlo, The Killer Within

The Pursuit of Happiness

"New York is not just the capital of the world but also the capital of that conglomerate of people that come with the promise of freedom, liberty, wealth, and the pursuit of happiness."
Fernando Briceño, Memoirs of an Illegal Alien

Fickle Town

"It's a fickle town, a tough town. They getcha boy. They don't let you escape with minor scratches and bruises. They put scars on you."
Reggie Jackson, quoted in Babe Ruth Slept Here

Streets and Windows

West 23rd

"For me, New York is streets and windows -- walking and looking."
Grace Paley, The New York Times

Land of the Chosen

"You're going there, darlin', going to the land of the corrupt and the compassionate, going to the land of the chosen, going to laugh and to weep and to dance with the lighthearted. You are going there to love and you are going there to grieve. You are going for the euphoria of an evening under the streetlamps of New York City where everything you touch is blessed, and everything you desire is a heavy weight on your back. There is your heaven, daughter. There is your wondrous hell."
Vera Jane Cook, Dancing Backward in Paradise

The Thrill of New York

"There is something about New York that gets into one's bones. When I am away miss the thrill of the crowds, the thrill of Broadway, the thrill of  the buildings, the thrill of business—in short, the thrill of New York."
W.B. Ruthrauff, The Literary Digest

Gotham

Metropolitan Opera House (Photo: Paul Masck / Wikimedia Commons)

"Gotham is a verbal city; people are always talking. And they do not make the usual separations between public and private conversation. Intermission at the Metropolitan Opera seems to be almost designed to reveal scores of individuals' relationship with their therapist."
Kenneth T. Jackson, David S. Dunbar, Empire City

Detox

Store on Third Avenue

"If you get New Yorkers out of the city for two weeks to detox, they are like everybody else."
Pat Schroeder, The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said

Another Country

Korea Way

"New York is like that. You can walk two blocks in any direction and be catapulted into another country."

Amy Gray, Spygirl

Reward

"New Yorkers are willing to sacrifice and they just accept the hardships of being there by purely just being there because there is just this expectation that it will pay back. And that the harder it is, the bigger the payback will be. It’s kind of like the same sentiment behind some religions: The worse you have it, the bigger the reward will be."
Mira Ptacin, The Atlantic