Hell

Fire escape in SoHo

"Hell isn’t fire and brimstone. It's New York City." 
Karina Halle, Veiled

Tricky

"The city is tricky. The highs are so much higher, but in the lows you drop straight down again to bedrock. It helps that streets are snapped to a grid. There are also psychic boutiques and sidewalk prophets, but until you contrive your own love story set in that city, even one as warped as mine, you remain outside it, looking for signals in the white smoke that rises from under, in the sudden hot laundry smells and the LED typos of street vendors donut easily becomes dount, ominously like don't, to my mind. There was a DOUNT sign on Second Avenue which more than once redirected my superstitious footsteps."
Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

Artistic Freedom

Great Jones Street

"We wrote a song called 'New York.' It was about New York as an idea. A place where anything is possible, a place where you can find complete artistic freedom. We wrote that song on a fucking Scottish island in the middle of nowhere, before we'd ever been to the city; that's how powerful it is."
Jimi Goodwin, quoted in Meet Me in the Bathroom

The Thing About Manhattan

Broadway

"That's the thing about Manhattan. You can't park, you can't play tennis outdoors, you can't get into a movie without waiting in line, but it's really the only place where the people are worth watching." 
Marissa Piesman, Personal Effects

Teeming Quality

Indian independence celebration on Madison Avenue

"In New York, like Calcutta, there is a teeming quality to the streets that robs us of our separateness, forces us too close to one another. We succumb to the crowd, become part of it."
Noah Hawley, A Conspiracy of Tall Men

Alive

Wall Street ferry terminal

"New York is something that is alive to me. She breathes in her air and puffs steam back out again. She eats her bread from the big table spread out on three sides of her and all of your other towns eat off of this same table. She washes herself in the clean upper end of the river and uses the lower sides for the toilet and outhouse. She drinks her water from the mountain tops and pulls her brass chain and dumps her filth down her east river. New York is her name and she knows no stranger and if you call her by name she'll answer you by yours."
Woody Guthrie, Woody Guthrie's Modern World Blues

Springtime in New York

Central Park (Pixabay)

"New York is nice come springtime. All the muggers bloom in Central Park."
John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos

Noise, Rudeness and Vitality

Madison Avenue

"The town was precisely what I knew it would be, what legend, fable, literature and Tin Pan Alley had long reported it to be, down to the clouds of steam blooming from the manholes, the boatlike wallow of the huge chequer cabs as they bounced and flipped their tyres on the great iron sheets that seemed to have been casually slung by a giant on to the surface of the street and the strange smoky whiff at every street corner that turned out, on inquiry, to be the smell of new-baked pretzel. Just what I had always known. Yet every five steps I took I could not but stop and grin and gasp and stretch my eyes at the theatre of it all, the noise and rudeness and vitality."
Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

The New York Way

North Williamsburg

"That's the way New York is. You have to just keep tearing it down and building it up."
Frank O'Hara, In Memory of My Feelings

Trick of Vision

SoHo

"There is a moment when all that is manifestly ugly, noisy and expensive can suddenly appear beautiful, civilized and desirable. The moment New York plays that trick of vision on you, it's impossible to go back through the looking-glass again. The city has made you a New Yorker."
Robert MacNeil, quoted in The Bookstore

Affront to the Senses

Number 1 subway train

"Everything about New York is a complete affront to the senses, from being sandwiched on a subway multiple times a day and being inappropriately groped, to habitually stepping over trash and being heckled by street vendors, not to mention keeping the requisite pushcart near the door to transport laundry and groceries with no thought to how unnatural it is to be pushing a caged contraption in five-inch heels on any given day."
Tamara N. Houston, Waiting for Jules

Veteran

VA Medical Center

"Every New Yorker's a veteran. They know to take cover when shooting starts."
Frank Castle, The Punisher War Zone

Coming Out of Winter

"New York is coming out of winter. Not that it ever hibernated; the city had just pulled its collar up and put its head down against the winds that whipped through its canyons, freezing faces and numbing lips. New Yorkers push through winter like soldiers through gunfire."
Don Winslow, The Force

New York Way of Life

"New York is so impressive. At first I was intimidated by the frantic pace, by the wealth, by the dynamic strength of the city. I felt so insignificant. Then I began to notice an informality which surprised me, but which I liked. For example, women think nothing of wearing expensive furs and boots and a kerchief covering their hair, sometimes barely hiding hairpins and rollers. An Italian woman would never do that. On the other hand, I find this way of life practical and intelligent." 
Renata Tebaldi, Renata Tebaldi

Irish

Third Avenue

"St. Patrick's Day in New York is the expression of everything Irish — at least if by 'Irish' you mean green beer, fake leprechauns, and giant Styrofoam shamrocks."
DK, Off the Tourist Trail

Hustle and Bustle

"New York is quite a place. Never saw so much hustle and bustle, pushing and crowding, noise and uproar in my life. This is one place where the devil takes the hindermost -- everyone else is too buy rushing to worry about it"
George W. Crawford, Three Crawford Brothers

Modern Myth

Manhattan skyline and North Williamsburg landing

"New York City seems almost like a modern myth, an urban landscape of ever-growing skyscrapers populated by larger-than-life characters real and fictional, the 'greatest city in the world' and the ultimate symbol of success."
Eva Kis, Metro

Across 110th Street

West 110th

"Across 110th Street
Pimps trying to catch a woman that's weak
Across 110th Street
Pushers won't let the junkie go free
Across 110th Street
Woman trying to catch a trick on the street
Across 110th Street
You can find it all in the street."
Bobby Womack, Across 110th Street

Emptiest Place

Battery Park (Pexels)

"New York is the only place I know that is surrounded by rivers but isn't defined by them. At the Battery, where the waters connect, you could live a lifetime and not see a heron in flight, a trout on a line. Instead, you've got Hong Kongers in photo flashes. Wealthy ones in tuxes and mammoth bridal gowns, posed before the towers of the World Financial Center, bringing home mementos, replica buildings on chains, the emptiest place on earth."
Larry O´Connor, Penalty Box

Best Sight

South Street Seaport

"All the definite images of New York City she'd accumulated were views from a distance. This was a place best seen from bridges and water and sky."
Hermione Hoby, Neon in Daylight

Of Mice and Rats

Subway sign (Paul Lawry / Wikimedia Commons)

"New York, New York, the city of dreams. No, it is vile! Out on the streets, rats run this town à la Rihanna and Jay-Z; the mice here are far more insidious. They invade your apartment, and so they invade your life. "
Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

Snob

Fifth Avenue (Pixabay)

"Spoken like a true New Yorker," said Ruthie. "Which is to say, like a snob."
Susan Rebecca White, A Soft Place to Land

Disneyworld

Wald Houses

"New York is a lot like Disneyworld. Everything is much more intense than normal, and it costs five times as much."
Rod Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming

Subway Fantasy

Coney Island subway station

"Who, standing on a trash-strewn platform in a far corner of Brooklyn after midnight, has not had the sensation that if they let the 3 pass them by, the next train would offer passage to some strange and foreign existence? Who hasn't waited until right before the door closed, only to see their conviction dissipate in the face of reality's cold waters, and the certainty that the next train won't roll past for another half hour?"
Daniel Polansky, A City Dreaming

Urgency and Beauty

"The way I feel about New York, I would go there just to stride about on its free stilts as other people would go to the seaside to be supine. There is urgency and beauty in every breath of it, from the showerbath humidity that drenches it in summer to the lovely murderous moment in winter when a taxi, its tyres humming through the night down the avenue, bursts through one of the pale spectres of steam from a subway grating and rushes on."
Hugh Johnson, Hugh Johnson on Wine

Coney Island

Luna Park

"I can hear the Atlantic echo back roller coaster screams from summers past.
And everything was closed at Coney Island, and I could not help from smiling.
Brooklyn will fill in the beach eventually and everyone will go except me."
Death Cab for Cutie, Coney Island

Someone Else's Drama

Met Museum (Pixabay)

"In New York, we are so frequently within earshot of strangers.  We constantly find ourselves smack in someone else's drama."
William Meyers, quoted in New York: The Big Apple Quote Book

Lump of Dough

Midtown Manhattan

"New York is a lump of dough in the process of kneading. The yeast has been working for some time, but the mass has yet to rise."
Arwin van Dam, Travel magazine

Humanity and Vice

Mural on West 14th

"Fourteenth Street reminds us that it is impossible to love humanity and to hate vice at the same time. Not even Jesus could do that. If the city had only Times Square and Fourteenth Street, New York would be the greatest metropolis on earth. That's before we even start to take into account all the rest of the island of Manhattan."
Tristan Jones, Adrift

Scary Place

House on East 18th

"New York is a pretty scary place. If you're going to depend on the kindness of the people in Manhattan, you're in big trouble."
"Leah," quoted in Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews

Tapioca-Tasting Poop

Alwyn Court

"Oh, here we go: 'New York is the greatest city in the whole wide world. It's where dreams come true and pigeon poop tastes like tapioca.'"
Stella Zinman (Sarah Chalke), How I Met Your Mother