Mouse in a Maze

Times Square subway station

"The skyline at night is so breathtaking and yet you could spend a whole lifetime in Manhattan and never see it. Like a mouse in a maze."
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

Prosaic

Midtown Manhattan (Pixabay)

"New York, the mecca of a hundred hopes, ambitions to be realized, dreams to become realties! But how few of the ideals come true, how many are shattered; for New York is essentially a prosaic city, and has little time for Romance."
Violet Sturgis Cosby, Selected Writings of Violet Sturgis Cosby

Anticipation

School of the Future

"New York was ahead of its time. It went in front, far in front of all the other cities in their march towards the future. Materially, with the audacity of its constructions, as much as spiritually, with its inhabitants' frenzy. New York should be called Anticípolis, being the city of anticipation."
Luis de Oteyza, Anticipolis

Global Geography

"Brooklyn is Brooklyn. But Brooklyn is also more than its physical boundaries. Though contained physically within its municipal borders, Brooklyn's larger geography is global, embracing the people and ideas, the music and the mystique it launches out into the larger world."
Ilana Abramovitch, Jews of Brooklyn

Cocaine

"New York is like cocaine.  The only way to be done is to leave it."
Andrew McGinn, The Fremocentrist

Liberty or Anarchy

"New York is a model of liberty, or perhaps anarchy, when it comes to political opinion, religion, clothing, body ornamentation, sexual proclivities and public etiquette."
Steve Chapman, Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century

City of Neighborhoods

South Street Seaport

"New York was a city of neighborhoods, of buildings that rose tall and proud into the sky, of blaring cab horns, hissing steam and the never-ending noise of construction."
Sarah Morgan, Sunset in Central Park

Longing for New York

Brooklyn Bridge Park (Pixabay)

"My love for New York, and my longing for it, simply grows year after year. The thing I love most about New York is the people. I find them to be the most friendly, tolerant, intelligent, considerate, interesting people in the world. I would consider it an absolute privilege to be able to live among them again."
Richard R. Schneider, The Cost of Courage

Mean Streets

"God, what an awful place New York is —look at it! Look at all the dirt and the mindless people and the mean streets! What a junk heap!"
Susan Howatch, Sins of the Fathers

Daydreams and Fairy Tales

Manhattan's West Side

"She watched with absolute wonder as they descended into New York. For her, it was as if they were about to land upon a newly discovered city, something reserved for daydreams and fairy tales."
Krista Lakes, Yours Royally

Wonderfully Alive

"New York is the same old place just one continual rip, tear in every conceivable direction but when one is rested and feels that he has a few dollars at the bottom of his pocket the old city is wonderfully alive and attractive."
William Carlos Williams, The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912

Phony

Peck Slip

"New York is so phony, all you need to make it here is a few good suits and real jewelry."
Bobby Short, quoted in New York magazine

Living in Brooklyn

Williamsburg

"Like many Americans, I fear living in a nowhere, in a place that is no-place; in Brooklyn, that doesn't trouble me at all. Everybody, it seems, is here."
Ian Frazier, Gone to New York

Jumping City

P.S. 75

"You can say what you want about New York, but it's the only city that jumps. It jumps twenty-four hours a day. It jumps in the morning when everybody's rushing to get to work, it jumps at lunchtime when everybody's in the streets rushing around digging everything, it jumps all afternoon when the kids are out of school and playing stickball or riding their pushos or playing stoopball or just lounging with the girls; it jumps, it's the goddamned jumpingest town in the world. And at night, when the lights come on, they set the pace, man, they tell the world this is New York, come live, man, this is New York where everybody's alive, where everybody jumps!"
Ed McBain, Big Man

Manhattan Districts

Crosby Street

"I saw that Manhattan had distinct districts, from the towering buildings of Midtown to the achingly cool cobbled roads around Crosby Street, where every second person looked like a model or as if they owned an Instagram feed devoted to clean eating."
Jojo Moyes, Still Me

Spontaneous Regeneration

"What Elena likes about New York is that most people have no past. It is as if they are the product of spontaneous regeneration—popping up from the soil without parents, siblings, hometowns, or the bad choices or rumors that followed them, the bullies who badgered them, and the lovers who betrayed them."
Mary Morris, Gateway to the Moon

Blood in the Veins

"New York is a living organism; the people who walk the city streets under the sprawling skeleton of endless scaffolding are the blood in its veins."
Peter Ferry, Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction

New York Feeling

"New York is interesting in that even at the bottom of the skyscrapers' deepest trenches a good portion of its inhabitants tend to feel a little bigger, a little more consequential, than they are."
Laird Hunt, The Exquisite

Struggling Mass

"Of course New York is the worst – a struggling mass of scheming, shallow sophisticates & the lowest kind of every race under the Sun. It is only when one gets away from the Eastern border that one can like America. "
Benjamin Britten, Letters from a Life Vol 2

True Metropolis

"Somebody once defined a true metropolis as a place where an individual can march down the street wearing a purple robe and a hat with bells on it, beating a drum and leading an elephant by the leash, and only get casual glances from passers-by. If so, then surely New York is the truest metropolis there is."
Peter L. Berger, American Culture: An Anthology

Immigrant Ship

South Street Seaport (Pixabay)

"The island of Manhattan is a gigantic metaphoric model of the compression of an immigrant ship that has moored and never left. Every apartment is like a berth. Every square metre of street is deck. The sky scraping offices are the bridge. Harlem and other areas are the hold."
John Berger, About Looking

New York Business

"Part of what’s interesting about living in New York is how much business you can choose to have with people who are absolutely none of your business. There’s something incongruous about how careful we are to set up boundaries, how ardent we are about maintaining them, and how quick we are to take a wrecking ball to them when it suits us."
Sloane Crosley, The New York Times

Female Force

Allen Street

"New York is one of the biggest love stories of my life. The energy is this intense, female force, and I can't get enough.”

Fredrik Eklund, New York Post

Tangible Power

"I stood looking downtown, 
Sixth Avenue, the lights 
stretching out and rising 
upwards on the buildings 
emitting a real, a tangible 
power, and you can feel it 
standing there in New York."
Matthew Rohrer, The Others

Anytime, Anywhere, Anybody

NYC ferry

"God, I love this city. Makes you feel like anything can happen anytime, anywhere . . . with anybody."
Carrie Fairchild (Mādchen Amick), Central Park West

Cooker

"New York is sort of the London of this century. There is Dickens's London, which is this potboiler of culture. New York seems to be the biggest cooker of them all."
Oscar Hijuelos, quoted in New York magazine

Sense of Recognition

Chrysler Building

"I think when people first come to New York they often experience a very strong sense of recognition, because we’ve all seen the movies and the TV shows and the photographs. We look for the landmarks and the clichés that we expect, and there they all are. There is the Chrysler Building, glinting, and there are all the yellow cabs surfing the green lights. We all feel as if it is our city. But that recognition proves—not untrustworthy, exactly, but to some extent a mistake. It is a different culture, and there are rules that you have to learn; you are, at first, a stranger. It takes time to adjust to the reality rather than the image."
Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

Almost Pleasant

Times Square (Pixabay)

"New York is a great, and withal a fine city, and if it were only kept clean, and had a tolerable system of street locomotion, and an efficient police, it would be the pleasantest residence in the New World."
Greville Chester, Chester's Transatlantic Sketches 

MTA

Subway entrance

"The head of New York's MTA said yesterday that there's a good chance public transit fares will rise next year. Also coming next year? Your train."

Seth Meyers, Late Night with Seth Meyers

Five-Borough Nation

"New Yorkers believe absolutely that any place that is not New York is by geographical definition inferior to the great five-borough nation. The Bronx has got better seafood than the Cote D'Azur. The beaches of Staten Island are far superior to anything Rio de Janeiro has to offer and it goes without saying that there isn't a commercial boulevard on the planet that can hold a candle to Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Therefore most New Yorkers do not travel—why the hell would they?"
Eoin Colfer, Screwed