Brutality

"The reason I like New York better than other places in the country is that in New York all the brutality is up front. Which to me is very satisfying."
Suzanne Vega, SPIN

Programmed

St. Ann's Warehouse

"New York was programmed into my bones, my marrow, my heart. It was me and I was it."
Holly-Jane Rahlens, Becky Bernstein Goes Berlin

Naturally Aggressive

"I like New Yorkers because they have no time for the niceties of life. They're like me in this. They're naturally aggressive, they don't believe in wasting time."
John Lennon, The Beatles: Off The Record 2

Microcosm

Long Island City

"Often times, living in New York is made possible by focusing on the microcosm of the life we've carved out for ourselves, so as not to be overwhelmed by her powerful diversity and boisterous vibrance."

Rachel Merrill Moss, KampFIRE

Spring Day in Brooklyn

East River State Park

"It happened every single spring day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin."
Kate Christensen, The Astral

Making It

"New York is a town about showing you can make it, making it, and then showing you've made it."
Shirley Conran, Crimson

Ruminating

Mad. Sq. Eats

"That New York is the great American walking city is well known. It's also the great American ruminating city: we think on our feet—chewing all the way. In Manhattan you're never far from food, and for me, nothing about city life has quite the racy, almost defiant allure of eating on the street. With a hot dog in hand I become jaunty and carefree, young and blithe-spirited."
Lynne Schwartz, This Is Where We Came In

Brain

Columbia University (Photo: Andrew Chen: Wikipedia)

"Every powerful nation must have one intellectual centre, as every individual must have a brain, whose motions and conceptions govern the entire system. In the United States, New York is that centre and that brain."
George G. Foster, New York in Slices

Two Horizons

"Manhattan is an island, and so she has two horizons—the architectural horizon, impermanent and stony, and the eternal horizon, constantly changing, that is created when water and sky work together in midair. It may be that the secret of Manhattan's hold over us is lost somewhere between those two horizons, the one hard and vulnerable, the other vague, shifting, and implacable."
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady

Destination Resort

Little Italy

"New York is becoming a destination resort, offering the same nonthreatening, family entertainment districts as Southern Florida or the 'new' Vegas. The way things are going, the city I love will soon present one unbroken vista of theme restaurants, chain stores, Starbucks, and merchandising outlets for the film studios—a smokefree Disney Zone and amusement park for every flabby-assed, no-necked fanny-packer and rube who thinks waiting on line outside the Hard Rock Café is a thrill ride. Survival of the fittest has been replaced, judging from the docile herds waddling through our streets in search of T-shirts and theater tickets, by survival of the fattest."
Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits

Eden

Brooklyn Bridge Park

"New York is Paradise in spring, an Eden, with infinitely more of happiness and beauty than was ever dreamed of by the shepherd patriarchs. The fruit of happiness and wisdom hangs from boughs so heavy laden down that there's no tempter needed but the fruit itself. There are no gates, no wall, no Cherubim with flaming swords to warn and to expel."
Rockwell Kent, Voyaging

Open Atmosphere

"In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone."
Patti Smith, Just Kids

Man Over Matter

"New York is by far the most magnificent and marvelous city in the whole world—a wonder to the eye and an incomparable stimulus to the imagination. Throned between its noble estuaries, it proclaims, in one majestic symbol, the supremacy of Man over Matter."
William Archer, The Atlantic Monthly

Out of the Game

East 23rd

"New York's a tough town without the coin, isn't it? You never get a glance when you're out of the game."
Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City

Things and Signs

NYC ferry

"New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire to—a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here."
Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate

Thinking of Leaving

Button on Roosevelt Island

"I don't know very many people in New York who don't also say 'I'm leaving.' I’ve been thinking of leaving for 35 years now, I’m almost ready."
Lou Reed, quoted in The Guardian

8 Million Stories

"There are 8 million stories in the naked city
Some ice cold and told without pity
About the mean streets and the ghetto culture
The pimps, the pushers, the sharks and vultures
Things that happen when it reaches dark
And all the things you hear about Central Park
You got to be down, you got to have strength
If you're gonna survive past 110th."
Kurtis Blow, 8 Million Stories

The Queen

"New York City, in herself, was a gladness, that romantic, beautiful exciting City, the Queen of all romantic Cities, with such sparkle in her air and in her people."
John Masefield, quoted in The Horn Book Magazine

Octopus

Restaurant in Little Italy

"New York is a very special city to me. In Italian, we have a word for it: tentacolare, like an octopus. It draws you in; it is a city that will seduce you."
Luciano Pavarotti, New York Magazine

Liberating

"New York has a liberating quality about it especially when you live and work here. As soon as you arrive in this city, you feel as if you already belong."
Michael Anthony, Forbes

Natural Habitat

Photo: Pixabay

"New York has become my natural habitat. I'd be fenced in anywhere else. I can behave exactly as I want: I can appear, I can disappear."
Lola Szladits, The New Yorker

Best and Worst

"New York is, par excellence, the city of extremes and contrasts. It is at once the very worst and the very best of all American cities, alike the very darkest and the very brightest. It is the city of crimes and the city of charities, the city of infidelity and irreligion, the city of the Sunday-school and the church, the city of the public rum-shop, and the city of the public school."
Thomas N. Doutney, Thomas N. Doutney: His Life-struggle, Fall, and Reformation

Everybody is an Outsider

SoHo

"New York is a place where everybody's an outsider, basically. I don't think I'm disregarding the vast swath of people who were born and raised in New York; even they would probably walk around SoHo today and feel like they don't fit in here."

Garth Risk Hallberg, Interview Magazine

Drudgery

Canal Street subway station

"For most people, even the elite, it is a city of drudgery. You sweat in the hot subway station, then you shiver in the crowded train, then you walk for ten blocks without an umbrella through a pounding summer thunderstorm . . . and you do this with desperation, because you have no other obvious choice. You do it every day."
Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land

Something You Feel

Brooklyn Bridge

"New York is the place you'll try to explain to everyone back home to no avail. You'll find there aren't enough words in your vocabulary. New York is not something you see, it's something you feel."

Laura Steiner, The Huffington Post

In the Middle of a Thunderstorm

"What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away... It's chaos. It's kinda like being in a car in the middle of a thunderstorm. Everything is raging around you, but you're safe inside that car. So New York feels very much to me like that."
Jack Dorsey, CBS News

Magnet

Battery Park and Statue of Liberty

"New York has been a magnet drawing to itself from East, North, South, West, from every state of the Union and from every European country, the restless, the dissatisfied and the ambitious, who have demanded more from life than the circumstances of their birth offered them."

Alec Waugh, quoted in Governing New York City

Fantasy Island

Manhattan skyline and Williamsburg Bridge

"Manhattan was the fuel in my spirit. But, there is a fantasy island, certainly not for the meek or unadventurous. This I will tell you, after New York City has boiled beneath your blood, none can call you down. I promise you that."

Vera Jane Cook, Dancing Backward in Paradise

Yours

Photo: Pixabay

 "They're not lying when they say that here, anything is possible—but the city is not the force that will change your life. The city can't harden you, or romanticize you, or break your spirits, or lift them up; it can only give you the freedom to do it all yourself. New York is amazing, not because there's always something to do here, or because it never sleeps, but because it's yours."
Brett Austin Robbins and James R. Williams, Inside New York 2008

Creative Perversity

"New York is indeed a matrix of creative perversity, with the endless frenetic motion of the streets, the conflicted desires of its millions, and the constant sense that one stands on the threshold of new experience."
Murray Pomerance, City That Never Sleeps

Berlin or Brooklyn

"Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now."
Don DeLillo, The Guardian