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

Coffee Shops

"I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of 'coffee shops' as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know."
Edmund White, City Boy

Circus of Horrors

"The main thing I like about New Yorkers is that they understand that their lives are a relentless circus of horrors, ending in death. As New Yorkers, we realize this, we resign ourselves to our fate, and we make sure that everyone else is as miserable as we are. Good town."
Kyle Baker, Why I Hate Saturn

Growing Up in New York

Coney Island

"Growing up in New York is like growing up nowhere else on this planet. In fact, I also believe that is why New Yorkers have a difficult time transitioning into other places in society. We speak our own language and do things our own way. Our pace is quick and everything we do we do fast. We speak fast, we drive fast, we think fast, we hustle fast, and we keep it moving."
Allen Brown, Mr. Understood

New York Magic

Restaurant in Little Italy

"New York is of no man and every man: of the Afghan taxi driver who barely speaks English, the turbaned Sikh, the wok-wielding cook in Chinatown and the singer of Neapolitan songs in the restaurants of Little Italy. It is of the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans who fill streets with plena, salsa and merengue; and the Russians, Ukrainians, Kosovars, Andalusians, Greeks, Nigerians, Irish, Pakistanis, Ethiopians who, as soon as they arrive, are turned into New Yorkers by the absorbent magic of the city."
Mario Vargas Llosa, The New York Times

Mythically Ugly

"New York is mythically ugly. It's going through a mythical disaster. However, it's the only exciting city there is. I love London; it's a village in comparison to New York."
Anjelica Huston, quoted in John Huston: A Biography

Concrete

East 42nd Street

"New York is concrete and concrete is New York."
Angela Herbert, A Short Holiday

Robbery

"Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place."
Johnny Carson, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes

City of Strangers

Third Avenue

"This is a city of strangers, a place where people yearn both to be left alone and to connect. Nowhere do public and private come together so completely as they do in restaurants. That is why New York is—and always will be—a city devoted to the joy of eating out."
Ruth Reichl, My City, My New York

Inhospitable

"New York is notoriously inhospitable to the past, disowning it whenever it can."
John D. Rosenberg, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations

Lousy

"Everybody agrees New York is lousy, yet everybody wants to come here."
Jimmy Breslin, The New York Times

Money to Burn

Fifth Avenue (Pixabay)

"If you have money to burn, New York City is a fun place to strike a match."
John del Signore, Gothamist