Too Large to Know

"I do not know New York. I can not interpret it. I do not know what its 'message' is. New York is too large to know. Too many things are simultaneously true of it."
Franklin Pierce Adams, quoted in How New York Became American

Casino

"New York wasn't Philadelphia or Boston. New York was a casino where anyone could play. You needed only to have the chips and sufficient chutzpah."

Russell Bittner, Trompe-l'oeil

State of Mind

Financial District

"New York doesn't make or break your day; she doesn't affect your mood. She just reflects the state of mind you're in. If you're having a bad morning she’ll do all she can to lift every paving stone to trip you up, if you're having a good afternoon she'll send every good-looking guy in a ten-mile radius to walk by you and give you a sexy smile."
Joanne Pittaway, Chess News

Unromantic

Midtown Manhattan (Pixabay)

"New York is not a romantic city. It does not choose to be. Romance is soft; so are Paris, Venice."
Linda Blandford, America on Five Valiums a Day

Public Fascination

The Sphere at Liberty Park

"New York City is an archipelago of public fascination. From the soaring heights of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty to the still-gaping wound of the World Trade Center, New York is the city that America consumes as greedily as any public figure, rejoicing in its triumphs, mourning with its losses, and gloating over its failures."
Russell Leigh Sharman and Cheryl Harris Sharman, Nightshift

Other Lady

Third Avenue

"He left me for another lady
He took my hand one day and told me
He was leaving
Me disbelieving
And I I I I I I I I
Had to let him go
Her name was New York, New York
And she took his heart away oh my
Her name was New York, New York."
Paloma Faith, New York

New York Myth

"New York was right now. The people I had read about, seen in magazines simply walked out the door, onto the sidewalk, stood right here. Stepped in there and got a drink. In these stone corridors, life began. The myth was true."
Eileen Myles, Inferno

Happening

"Brooklyn is what's happening in New York City. And what's happening in New York City is happening in Brooklyn."
Harold Augenbraum, quoted in The Brooklyn Experience

Memory and Amnesia

Midtown

"The city is constantly being tugged between the forces of memory and amnesia. Every un-renovated tenement is an offense to someone's sense of progress, each new building a desecration of someone's childhood. We fret because the city is changing too quickly and also not nearly fast enough. But, outside occasional periods of disenchantment, one constant remains: New York is not quite ample enough for all the people who want to be here."
Justin Davidson, Magnetic City

Digging New York

"A whiff of corner hotdogs
And nearly everybody's got dogs
This apple's sweet and big
Here life's a crazy gig
One thing I know
I dig New York!"
Barry Manilow, I Dig New York

Babylon

Wall Street (Andres Nieto / Wikimedia Commons)

"Manhattan is the sun at the center of all the wealth in the universe. No power on earth, or in the rumored colonies of the moon and the planet Mars, is greater than the power emanating from Manhattan. If there was a Golden Age of Babylon, in which all that made it a name of infamy had not existed, Manhattan is that Babylon. There are streets of gold in Manhattan."

Jack Henry Abbott, On the Bowery

Mathematical Solution

"New York is a product of American commercial civilisation, but it is not representative of American civilisation itself. The narrow island of Manhattan, with its myriad aspiring towers, has all the alluring precision of a mathematical solution. But the United States is not a country of solutions."
James Pope-Hennessy, America is an Atmosphere

Day and Night

"By day New York turns to practicality, to the provident tasks of survival. But at night ancient Manhattan comes back as a ghost from a deeper world still living but unwisely forgotten."
Mark Caldwell, New York Night

Fluid

"New York is in a constant state of mutation. If a city conceivably may be compared to a liquid, it may be reasonably said that New York is fluid: it flows."
Carl Van Vechten, Parties

Born Modern

Sony Building

"New York is really the oldest city in the world. Meaning it is the oldest modern city. It was born modern."
McKenzie Wark, quoted in Capital New York

New York at a Distance

Staten Island Ferry

"Oh, I wished that it were possible to know New York in that way only — as a masterpiece wrought for the illumination of the sight, a splendor lifting aloft and shedding its radiance like a searchlight, making one big and great with feeling. Oh, that I should never draw nearer to descend into its precipitous gorges, where visions are broken and shattered and one becomes one of a million, average, ordinary, insignificant."
Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home

Woman

"New York is a woman, and as such she is a little of everything. Certainly, she is a sophisticate. Sometimes she is a lady of the evening. To her cosmopolitan visitors, she is always a gracious hostess deferential to their differing points of view. And like a true Earth Mother, she rests but never sleeps."
Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress

Hundred Villages

"I was in the mood to stay aboveground, to look out the window as the scenery changed and really see it: the way one Manhattan neighborhood slides into the next, a hundred villages, each of a different character, all piled up on one island."
Suzanne Rindell, Three-Martini Lunch

Anger

Mulberry Street

"The anger never quite disappears. In New York, city of dreams where only the cleverest or luckiest gain traction, it's everywhere, the anger."
Erica Abeel, Wild Girls

Fear of Missing Out

Midtown Manhattan

"Being in New York means treating the rest of the world like it has perpetual #FOMO. You're in New York, and everyone else isn't."
Drew Magary, Deadspin

Self-Worship

"In Manhattan, you didn't spend your time gazing at rivers or distant climes, you searched for roof gardens and observation decks that allowed you to stare back at the city in a perpetual act of self-worship."
Kimberley Tait, Fake Plastic Love

Overwhelming

Times Square (Pixabay)

"The city was overwhelming, in all the best ways. On a crowded street, you felt as if worlds were hurtling past you: men, women, and children, unknowable, with exaltations and miseries of their own. Each of them looking both battle-hardened and hopeful in that distinctly New York City way."
Brian Morton, Florence Gordon

Everywhere

"The idea of living anywhere else has never occurred to me. Indeed, to live in New York is to have lived everywhere."
Glenn Ligon, The New Yorker 

New York Careers

Financial District (Pixabay)

"This was the problem with New Yorkers. Career took precedence over everything. Even death."
Veronica Henry, High Tide

Fondness

Manhattan skyline (Pixabay)

"New York is as ugly as they said, as big as they said, as noisy as they said, and as crazy as they said, but though I was only in the city for only an hour I acquired a strange fondness for it. I guess I never felt so damn free. Like I could get into so much. I could see why so many would arrive trying to fulfill a dream."
Damon Murphy, Sons Like Me

The Time to Move to New York City

Yale Club

"The only time to move to New York City is when you're fresh out of college, unless you happen to be rich. If you're rich, you can move to New York whenever you want."
Sarah Dunn, The Arrangement

History

"A New Yorker interested in the history of New York is by definition a lunatic, going against the tide, swimming or rowing upstream against the press of his fellow citizens, all of whom don't give a shit about this past stuff."
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140

Deep

"New York is in fact a deep city, not a high one."
Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader

What New York Is Made Of

"This is New York, it's made of pee."
Max (Kat Dennings), 2 Broke Girls

Beginning of Europe

Flag on East 23rd

"For Europeans New York is America but for Americans it is the beginning of Europe."
Paul de Rousiers, American Life