Sunday, January 31, 2016

Missing Out

Third Avenue

"New York is a place that has a talent for provoking the suspicion that, no matter how hard you work or play, you're still missing out on something. Someone you know is doing better or having more fun than you are."
Ralph Gardner Jr., The Wall Street Journal

Saturday, January 30, 2016

City of Money

Rockefeller Center

"New York has, to state the obvious, become the city of money. People say your rent should be 30% of your salary; in Manhattan today, at least for many people, it feels like it hovers around 300%."
Moby, The Guardian

Friday, January 29, 2016

New York Flavors

Smorgasburg in North Williamsburg


"A city of strong flavors, of gasps and not sights. It feeds you on mustard and Tabasco sauce and makes you mainline on adrenalin. It is not possible to be neutral about it. It has a thumping heart."
Trevor Fishlock, Americans and Nothing Else

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Ideal City

North Williamsburg


"Every time I go to New York I find it more beautiful and closer to the shape of an ideal city. It may also be the fact that it is a geometric, crystalline city, without a past, without depth, apparently without secrets; therefore it is the city which intimidates me the least, the city which I can have the illusion of possessing in my mind, of being able to think about in its entirety all in the same instant."
Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Inclusiveness


"New York will achieve its position—it has achieved the position it has—rather by in- than by exclusiveness, and it is good that there should be a place where all sorts of foreignesses—all sorts—should be united as it were in a common frame."
Ford Madox Ford, quoted in Mirror for Gotham

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

New York Rhythm

Canal Street subway station

"What l feel about New York is hard to say in a few words. It's really the rhythm of the city. You feel it the moment you walk down the street. There's hundreds of good restaurants, thousands of brilliant paintings, you see all the old movies, all the new ones. ... It has to do with nerves, with the blood that runs through the city. It's dangerous, noisy. It's not peaceful or easy and because of it you feel more alive."
Woody Allen, Woody Allen: An Illustrated Biography

Monday, January 25, 2016

New York Doesn't Love You

Little Italy

"New York City doesn't love you. Why would you think you're in a relationship with New York? It's not a boyfriend or a parent. New York will never give you its approval because New York City is too busy being New York City to care about you."
John Devore, Medium

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Snowy New York

Central Park (Pixabay)

"In the snow, New York City becomes a fantasy version of itself. A blanket of winter weather slows this frantic city down, hushes the hurly-burly, covers it in a quiet beauty that turns a mundane walk into a romantic stroll. Snowy New York is the New York you dreamed of: old-fashioned, elegant, irresistible."
Jason Gay, The Wall Street Journal

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Insulating Yourself

West 14th

"Living in New York City is all about insulating yourself from the outside world."
Bruce Hinton, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said About New York



Friday, January 22, 2016

Streets and Avenues

25th and Third Avenue


"The peculiarity of New York is that while the avenues are its show, the side streets are its soul."
Ada Louise Huxtable, The New York Times

Thursday, January 21, 2016

World Class


"Confidence unbalanced by modesty ought at the very least to be balanced by a certain degree of realism. And New Yorkers have a way of missing both, of forgetting, for instance, that the mere act of living in a world-class city doesn't make you a world-class human being."
Sean Glennon, This Pats Year

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

New York Stories


"I hate when people go, New York City: 8 million people, 8 million stories. There's three New York stories, alright: There's 'I moved here,' 'I lived here all my life' and Ghostbusters."
Mike Lawrence, Time Out NY

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

New York Light

Lexington Avenue


"New York was not just bricks and concrete and glass and steel. It was also a mysterious concentration of experiences and attitudes and aspirations that were drawn together by the city's sumptuous, penetrating light."
Jed Perl, New Art City

Monday, January 18, 2016

Well of Inspiration

Bowery


"New York is also an endless well of inspiration. Ideas come to me in New York. I'm drawn toward reality, authenticity. I find that more in New York than anywhere."
Matt Dillon, The Daily News

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Grand Love Affair

Grand Central Terminal

"I'd entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan. I went willing to live there forever, to become one of the women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. I was ready for the city to sweep me into its arms, but instead it held me at a cool distance. And so I left New York the way one leaves a love affair too: because, much as I loved it, I wasn't truly in love. I had no compelling reason to stay."
Cheryl Strayed, Goodbye to All That

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Nice Village

Greenwich Village

"I had the typical cliché attitude toward New York City: that it's tough, and I was gonna have to tough out three weeks down here. It turns out that it's a nicer Village than the one I live in in Vermont."
Billy Romp, quoted in Sidewalk


Friday, January 15, 2016

Avant Garde

Public Theater

"New York is always ahead of its time. New York is always in the avant garde. So while it is true that in Europe the culture is dying, here it is already dead."
Volker Schlöndorff, quoted in Theaters


Thursday, January 14, 2016

Present-Tense City

Dumbo

"New York is a present-tense city. It lives in the moment, perhaps because the city's full-blast immediacy engages all the senses simultaneously, squeezing the faculties that allow for reflection on the past and speculation about the future. Like riders on a roller coaster, New Yorkers simply hold on tight."
William Grimes, Appetite City

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

New York Style


"New York style is: Being born there, on the island of Manhattan, and wanting, always, to be a visitor."
Leo Lerman, New York Magazine


Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Times Square

Times Square

"The cab driver took her to Times Square, which is like hell without the hygiene."
Nancy Banks-Smith, quoted in America in Quotations

Monday, January 11, 2016

Home

Sixth Avenue

"New York is a wonderful, wonderful place to live if you don't know where your home is."
Elizabeth Strout, The Globe and Mail



Sunday, January 10, 2016

Wonder City


"New York is a wonder city, a veritable fairyland
With many sights not to be seen in Massachusetts or Maryland.
It is situated on the island of Manhattan
Which I prefer to such islands as Welfare or Staten.
And it is far superior
To the cities of the interior."
Ogden Nash, Many Long Years Ago

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Economics and Finance

Madison Avenue


"New York is different. It is a very tight little island, not really part of the United States, it belongs to the world. It lives in an abstract world of economics and finance."
Bruce Graham, quoted in Space on Earth

Friday, January 8, 2016

Winter City

Rockefeller Center


"The true city is the winter city. The woolly enchantment of a population swaddled and muffled, women and men in long coats, eccentric boots, winding scarves; steam sculptures forming out of human breath; hushed streets; tiny white electric points on skeletal trees! The icy air like a scratch across a sheet of silver, the smoky chestnut carts, the foggy odor of hot coffee when you open a door, a bakery's sweet mist swirling through its transom, a glimpse of rosy-nosed skaters in the well of the Rockefeller stelae, the rescuing warmth of public lobbiesNew York in January is a city of grateful small shocks."
Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary



Thursday, January 7, 2016

New York Energy

Dumbo

"New York is, like, its own kind of energy. It's got its own character and either you're in the flow of that and things are going great, or it's kicking your ass. There's really no in between."
Josh Radnor, Vulture



Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Classroom

Columbia University


"New York City is a giant classroom. Every time you walk around you have an opportunity for learning."
Jon Cotner, Urban Omnibus




Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Full

Little Italy

"In all the vast grid of the city, with layer upon layer of apartments, office buildings, downtown cafés; on the rebellious streets of Greenwich Villäge, or in the dire districts to the east where marginal individuals hung on amid the unfriendly squalor of aging Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians—wherever I looked, there was no place for me. New York was full, it squeezed me out."
Paul Zweig, Departures

Monday, January 4, 2016

Life of Its Own

Madison Avenue


"New York has a life of its own, its own pulse, which beats just a bit faster than that of its inhabitants."
Uri Savir, The Little Red Book of New York Wisdom

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Arriving in New York


"Arriving in New York is always an overwhelming sensation, the great iron city that opens up to reveal a heart of pure fibre and muscle, a constellation of skyscrapers that welcomes foreigners with open arms, that great magnet that attracts immigrants from the four corners of the planet with an irresistible force."
Mario Guillermo Huacuja, In the Name of the Son

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Perfect Island



"All stars lead to this city
she's an angel unfolding midnight
a river of invisible trumpets
and sidewalks of moons
she's the blues
drunk on the light
commuting with love
on a sailboat
that's found
the perfect island."
Nathalie Handal, Lady Liberty

Friday, January 1, 2016

New Year's Day

Times Square subway station

"The essential trend of New Year's Day in Manhattan is philosophical and psychological. The average New Yorker wakes up with the positive feeling that a squadron of tiny air planes is racing around a course roughly marked off by the back of the head and the pit of the stomach; he concocts a mixture calculated to tone down the constant droning of the motors of the said air planes, and then he ponders on the strange custom that sends an ordinarily civilized population into bacchanalian hysteria on the night of December 31 of each year."
L.S.B. Shapiro, The Montreal Gazette