Anything

"In New York, anything is possible, anything is normal, and anything can happen. Anything and its opposite."
Luca Spaghetti, Un Amico Italiano

Old World

Rose Hill Historic House

"New York is really not an American city. It's really the Old World, the world of Europe reconstituted in some kind of fantasy."
Jerome Charyn, Conversations with Jerome Charyn

Sunday in New York

Gantry Plaza State Park

"New York on Sunday
Big City taking a nap
Slow down, it's Sunday
Life's a ball, let it fall in your lap
And if you've got troubles
Go take them out for a walk
They'll burst like bubbles
In the fun of a Sunday In New York."
Bobby Darin, Sunday in New York

New York Buildings

North Williamsburg

"In L.A., rich people live with rich people and poor people live with poor people. In New York, that’s from building to building. Like I asked my friend, I said, 'Man, what’s a good building?' He said, ‘A good building, you got a door man. A bad building, you just got a man in a door."
D.L. Hughley, Time Out

Queens

"Not much interest is paid to where the poor folks go. In NYC it's often the borough of Queens, which so far in the city's history has remained resolutely unhip and uncolonized."
John Strausbaugh, New York Calling

Glittering City

Manhattan skyline (Pixabay)

"New York is New York is New York, and there is no place like it in the world, and any other city, country, or even continent is but a pale reflection of that glittering city."

Ed McBain, Jack and the Beanstalk

New York Smell

Madison Square Park

"The entire city of New York smells like garbage and flowers. You can buy daisies in winter, dyed Kool-Aid colors and frostproofed with shellac. Rats arrange bouquets out of the junk people throw out."
Daniel Allen Cox, Shuck

Wasteland

Soho

"New York had become the land of bottle service night clubs, middle-aged men fucking girls younger than their daughters while their wives were away, people who saw you as a piece of ass and not much else, half-talented Ivy League alums holding onto employment listings as a Nazi holds the keys to a death camp. This city was a wasteland in which the wealthy had turned the average person into a play toy."
Greg Wright, A Year in New York

Change

Sign in the Diamond District

"If you're from New York, even if you're a teenager, you've seen building town down and new buildings put up. That's what happens in New York. New York is all about change."
Meredith Sue Willis, Meli's Way

Crazy Edge

Crosby Street

"I begin to feel myself falling in love. With New York—the energy and commotion of this city, the crazy edge that's missing from other big cities I've visited."
Cynthia Langston, Bicoastal Babe

Ponderous

"New York is humming bumblebees, never silent, always industrious, but ... ponderous!"
Carole Nelson Douglas, Femme Fatale

City in Mourning

Alphabet City

"Black is big in New York. It's a city in mourning. Everybody wears black winter and summer."
Nevada Barr, Liberty Falling

Sneeze

East 23rd

"New York is the only place someone will sneeze on you and then get mad you're in their way."
Chris D'Elia, The New York Times

Disneyland

Brooklyn (Photo: Pixabay)

"Manhattan is not real. It's like Disneyland. Brooklyn is more of a living kind of place. You have a neighborhood."
Abram Hall, In the Country of Brooklyn

Fortune

Downtown Manhattan Heliport

"Manhattan is money, plain and simple. It's money growing, money spent, money divided to double and divide again, money tucked and trimmed and shaved so that a penny made on a bid-ask trade is multiplied mathematically, then exponentially, and then again until it's grown into a fortune."

William Martin, City of Dreams

Unforgettable Love

Brooklyn Bridge (Pixaabay)

"That was the thing about New York. For most people who moved there from a smaller place, the way I did, things were never the same afterward. It was like a great love in your life that you could never forget, whether it had gone sour or not."

Janet Steen, Goodbye to All That

Human Faces

Washington Square Park

"Dear, dirty, devouring New York, the capital of human faces, the horizontal Babel of human tongues."
Paul Auster, 4321

Hussy

"New York, the hussy, was taken in sin again!"
Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade

Swelled Heart

Photo: Pixabay

"The view of the Manhattan skyline always made my chest feel too full, like my heart had suddenly swelled in the way of the Grinch who stole Christmas the moment he went soft."
Camille Perri, The Assistants

No Pity

North Williamsburg

"New York, a place for the deranged and wrecked and bold, a place where pity couldn't exist if it wanted to because there would have to be too much of it."

Molly Prentiss, Tuesday Nights in 1980

Daily Surreal

"Look, I'm from New York. That 'we've seen it all' attitude? It's based in fact, not arrogance. If you've seen it all—in the course of a recent hour, two dogs in mink coats (I asked; I had to), a guy selling used dentures from a backpack (yes, really), if you know the ropes (at a deli during the morning rush,  do not ponder the menu, do not dig around in your bag for exact change, just order and keep moving)—then irony's passé. And something else overtakes—something older. Brisker. Sharper. Let's call it the absurd. The daily surreal."
Lia Purpura, Brief Encounters

Romeo and Juliet

"I'm in love with New York. I have a passion beyond words for it. Like Romeo and Juliet—love at first sight. It is the most beautiful city in the world. I love the huge mingling of enormous amounts of people, races. The mixture of cruelty and innocence. New York is a piece of mythical reality, as beautiful as the Sahara Desert."
Pier Paolo Pasolini, The New York Times

In Sight and Out of Reach

Gantry Plaza

"New York is a city in which life sweats differently, where everything is perennially in sight but mostly just out of reach. The victories are mixed and sometimes hardly discernable from losses, and no matter how far you think you've made it at any point in time…you're only ever one fuck up away from realizing how far you have to go."

Elizabeth Bukhshteyn, Thought Catalog

Five Boroughs

"When you thought of New York, you imagined Manhattan as its mansion, Staten Island and Queens as its lawns and Brooklyn as its scullery. The Bronx became the city's jakes."
Tom Walker, Return to Fort Apache

Crowds of New York

"Nowhere do I feel freer than amid the crowds of New York. This light, ephemeral city, which every morning and evening, beneath the curious rays of the sun, seems a mere juxtaposition of rectangular parallelepipeds, never stifles or depresses. Here you may suffer the anguish of loneliness, but not that of crushing defeat."
Jean-Paul Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live

Hard-Boiled

"No matter how hard-boiled you think you are, thought Daniel Gordon, you're never quite prepared for New York."
Brian Morton, Florence Gordon

Dream Weavers

H&M store

"New York City is for dream weavers, sug...and loners, people chasing the tail of their desires, too poor in spirit for reflection...too ambitious, sometimes, for kindness."
Vera Jane Cook, Dancing Backward in Paradise

Get Back On

North Williamsburg landing

"You can't let the city get you down. When you fall off New York, what you do? Get right back on."
Paul Buchman (Paul Reiser), Mad About You

Steel Lilies

Manhattan skyline (Pixabay)

"There it was, New York City, thrust from the dull miles of water like a clutch of steely lilies."
Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

World Travel

Unisphere (Pixabay)

"To live in New York was to travel the world while standing still."
Julia Anne Miller, The New York Times

Beginning and End

Downtown Manhattan (Pixabay)

"For better or worse, New York consistently has had the biggest and the most of virtually everything. It is the beginning and end of thoughts and actions that move the mind, manners, and money of America."
Louis Sabin, Boy's Life