Spectacle

Pier 17

"New York provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing."
E.B. White, Here is New York

Safe Haven

"You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what makes it a safe haven for individuals everywhere."
Maeve Brennan, quoted in Pain, Parties, Work

New York Ideology

Fifth Avenue

"New York was still New York. The whole culture was dominated by the ideology of shopping and fucking."
Bernard Henri Lévy, American Vertigo

Anodyne

"You know what New York is for me, it's an anodyne. And how many places are that?"
Al Pacino, Al Pacino: The Authorized Biography

Great Equalizer

West 34th Street

"New York is the great equalizer. If you know how to cross a street, you can make it in New York. If you can cross a street without getting hit by a car in New York you can make it."
Audra McDonald, New York

Up and Down

Park Avenue

"New York City, you're everything my heart and soul inside
New York City, oh, I'm stuck here, stuck inside of
New York City, I been with ya up and I been with ya down
New York City, I can't get myself outa this town."
Al Kooper, New York City (You're a Woman)

Wholly Different

"New York is a kaleidoscope. I myself can remember it a wholly different thing. One passes down a street one day, and the next there is a great gap where some building is being torn down ; a few days later, as one fancies, a tall structure of some sort is touching the sky. It is wonderful, but it does not tend to calm of mind."
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Shuttle

New York Friendship

"New York friendship is an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive."
Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level

Serendipity

SPiN

"It's very hard to stay separate and above in New York. I also tend to suffer from inertia and don't constantly look for ways to surprise myself. New York, by its very definition, does that. All you have to do is walk 20 blocks in any direction, and you'll see something or meet someone you hadn't counted on. The serendipity of New York is something I treasure."
Susan Sarandon, Time Out

Summer in New York City

Washington Square Park

"Summer in New York City is a little bit like dying and going to purgatory. You know you'll get out someday, but you find that hard to believe."

Maureen Stapleton, New York Magazine

Entire World

"New York is a city that represents the entire world, I think. You got a whole lot crammed into a small space here in New York City, on this tiny little island, and I feel like the world could learn from that. If everyone in this city can co-exist, then why can't we do that as a planet?"
Dave Grohl, 101 WRIF

Jewels

"New York standing up above Manhattan is like a rose-colored stone in the blue of a maritime sky; New York at night is like a limitless cluster of jewels."
Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White

A Real New Yorker

"You're not a real New Yorker until you've stolen a cab from someone who needs it more than you do."
Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), How I Met Your Mother

Luxury Product

Harry Winston

"If New York City is a business, it isn't Wal-Mart—it isn't trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market. It's a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product."
Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg's New York

Novelty

"New York is a queer city. I have the theory that novelty, not luck or ability is what gets by there. New York doesn't care about merit so much as it does about something new to tickle its eyes, its palate or its ears."
Paul Whiteman, The Saturday Evening Post

The Lord

The Church of the Ascension 

"New York is a lot like the Lord in that it helps those who help themselves."
Gavin McInnes, The Death of Cool

Anything Can Happen

Pier 17

"The most riveting thing about New York is that anything can happen there. Only the week before, a woman had been eaten by an escalator. Can you beat that?"
Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

Nostalgic

West 32nd

"New York has always been the one place where people are nostalgic for when it used to be worse."
Sloane Crosley, How Did You Get This Number 

Acceleration

"I always have the impression, landing at JFK Airport, that I'm moving into a higher class. What I like about New York is that it is Paris under acceleration. A city is a speed. New York is an acceleration: it is the second derivative of the modern city."
Yann Moix, What Good Are Intellectuals?

Dazzing Mosaic

Astor Place

"New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic."
Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work

A Thousand Nationalities

"William is mesmerized by the sights and smells of the New York subway system, the only place where you can mingle with a thousand nationalities simultaneously passing gas."
Elaine Szewczyk, I'm With Stupid

Intense

"Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets."
Edmund White, City Boy

Aliens

Times Square subway station

"New York was an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens."
Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine

Ravenous

Broadway street fair

"New Yorkers are a ravenous people. Every hundred feet is a restaurant, coffee shop, or frozen yogurt stand, with bales of cardboard and mounds of garbage bags at the curb as proof of the appetites of the clientele."
Garrison Keillor, Wobegon Boy

Relationship

Dumbo

"New York is like the boyfriend you love and hate at the same time. It’s the relationship you stay in far longer than you should, based on the idea of how good it could be."
Carola Lovering, Elite Daily

Ancient Rome

"New York is a good place to dream. I love Buenos Aires, where I live, and London and Paris, but New York is like ancient Rome, the capital of the world."
Jorge Luis Borges, New York Magazine

New York Look

"Most New Yorkers want to look amazing, and they want you to understand that they look amazing, but they also want you to stop staring at them. 'Yeah, it's a Yeojin Bae Lydia Sunray Pleat Dress,' the brunette's cold eyes seem to say. 'Now let me sample the Burnt Sugar Tasti-D and get the hell out of my life.'"
Ellie Kemper, The Huffington Post

Twenty-One

21 Club

"Living in New York was also starting to lose its luster. No one tells you this, but the city is only a fun place to live if you are twenty-one or have twenty-one million dollars."
Ryan O'Connell, I'm Special

Manhattan Quadrants

Manhattan (Pixabay)

"The island is organized, in the minds of island dwellers, into four quadrants: Up, Down, Right, and Left. The 'Up' and 'Down' areas are believed to be markedly distinct—with  Up being preferable for raising children and Down being considered primarily a place for pre-reproductives, cultural 'outsiders,' feasting, and ecstatic nighttime rites."
Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

Modern Thought

New York Public Library

"New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought."
Francis Picabia, quoted in Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine