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Long Island City and Manhattan skyline

"There is always more to New York. More than you've seen or care to see."
Hari Kunzru, White Tears

Melange of Sounds

Jefferson Market Garden

"If you're walking or driving through New York, it almost feels like you’re changing radio stations. One minute it's the siren of an ambulance; the next minute it's music coming out of a store, or the subway running, or children coming from school, or someone screaming at someone else. It's just a melange of sounds that I find interesting."
Andrew Dosunmu, The Village Voice

Forward Motion

Lexington Avenue

"The warm humid air of New York clung to the night, unwilling to relinquish its suffocating hold. And yet to Eva, the city had an underlying hum of possibility; a constant forward motion that promised, no matter what, that change was on its way."
Kathleen Tessaro, The Perfume Collector

August in Manhattan

NYPL in Morningside Heights

"It was August, and hot and humid as only August in Manhattan can be; the city lay enclosed in a monstrous bowl of airless, evil-smelling gray-yellow stud that might be air but would kill most Amazonian Indians."
Judith Krantz, I'll Take Manhattan

Best Place in New York

Park Avenue South

"All that can be said with certainty is: The best place in New York is the night; the worst place in New York is the morning."
Jay McInerney, New York Magazine

New York Identity

"I liked not losing my New York identity and my New York way of saying 'wintuh' in February and 'waituh' in restaurants. When I walked the streets of New York, cops in police cars would call out, 'Hey, Neil. How you doin'?'  with just enough of the sound of Little Italy or a hint of an Irish brogue passed on down through their family of patrolmen. It made New York seem like a small town to me."
Neil Simon, The Play Goes On

Divorce

"New York is bounded on the North, South, East, and West by the state of divorce."
Langdon Mitchell, The New York Idea

Atom Bomb

"In New York who needs an atom bomb? If you walked away from a place they tore it down."
Bernard Malamud, The Tenants

New York Artist

Lower East Side

"New York is the place for an Artist if he can put up with the noise."
William Sidney Mount, quoted in Young America

Gossip and Friendship

"New York is a city that runs on gossip and friendship, a predatory mix that is, of course, best cultivated on the street and through skimming the pages of The New York Post."
Michelle Berry, Shippy First Drafts

Burying New York

Office of Chief Medical Examiner

"They've been burying New York for decades now. They've tried to say New York is dead, but they've never produced a body . . . and they never will."
Timothy Healy, quoted in A Mayor's Life

Stone Heard

Midtown West

"I looked down in ravishment. So you didn't have to see New York stiff-necked, from below, I thought. The skyscrapers looked different too, from alongside, as though as though they belonged there, a stone herd of zebras, gazelles, rhinos and giant tortoises."
Erich Maria Remarque, The Promised Land

New York Burden

Eleventh Avnue

"Guys on the sidewalk said lots of things, most of them vile. It was part of the burden of living in New York, and also part of the reason why Caroline couldn't imagine living anywhere else."
Kyle Smith, A Christmas Caroline

Special Place

Riverside Drive

"New York is a very special place. It's very hard to live in and very hard to live away from too."
Sami Shalom Chetrit, Doll's Eye

Continent

Broadway

"Europe lies at one end of Broadway, America at the other. In a few miles Broadway unrolls a continent for us to see."
Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Travels on the Lower Mississippi

New York Style

Macy's window

"When I moved to the city, I figured everyone stepped out in fashion-blogger-worthy outfits every single day, perfect down to the last statement pinkie ring. But in reality, New York is less about over-the-top splash and more about low-key style."
Georgia Clark, The Bucket List

Theme Park

Luna Park

"Compared with Baltimore, New York feels like a city-themed theme park. The difference between the two places is the difference between affectation and insanity, the eccentric and the grotesque."
Tim Kreider, The New York Times

New York Hum

East 23rd Street

"I should've heard the noise of.of the city—millions of people bustling around, thousands of cars and machines—the hum of a huge metropolis. You don't think about it when you live in New York, but it's always there. Even in the dead of night, New York is never silent."
Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian

Crux

East 42nd and Grand Central Terminal

"New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it."
Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

Worth Fighting For

"I stay for the unexpected spectacle and the chance encounter. And for those tough seagulls gliding inland on rainy days to remind us that Manhattan is an island, a potential space both separate and connected. Most of all, I stay because I need New York. I can't live anywhere else. So I hold on to what remains. We've lost a lot, but there's so much left worth fighting for. And while I stay, I fight."
Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York

Forgetting

"Does anyone come to New York clean? I'm afraid not. But crossing the Hudson I thought of crossing Lethe, milky river of forgetting."
Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

Encountering New York

"New York's the city where among other words God
can only be screamed. you encounter New York
driving from New York to New York. or
out of Neon into the Bronx."
Ron Winkler, Since It's New York

New York Types

East 25th

"There were three types of people in New York: people like Nora, who had found their home there; people who talked about how much they hated it and would always live and eventually die there; and people who always had one foot over the border, to Scarsdale or Roslyn or Boca Raton."
Anna Quindlen, Alternate Side

Granite Ocean

Midtown Manhattan

"I love the buildings. They're called skyscrapers. They're the closest thing to an ocean here. But it's an ocean that goes straight up, not flat out. They say that the body of water stretching away to the east of Manhattan is the ocean but it isn't. Not my ocean, anyway. It's weird because back home I just took it for granted, my grey-green sea. Now I have a granite ocean. It gives me the same happy-sad feeling I need sometimes. When I look straight up at the buildings I can feel alone in a good way. Not in that horrible way of no one knows me."
Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees

New York Flavor

Mad. Sq. Eats

"New York is it. The constant motion, the oceans of people, the roar of traffic and the all- night action of downtown Manhattan have a distinct, fascinating flavor all their own."
John Mitchum, Them Ornery Mitchum Boys

Everything Under the Sun

Top of the Rock

"My dear child, New York is the third city of the world in size,—not quite so large as London, but approaching it. It is a great, brilliant, gay place, where everything under the sun can be bought and seen and done." 
Susan Coolidge, In the High Valley

Hell

"We don't need to go to Hell. We live in New York."
Don Nigro, Armitage

City of Survivors

Riverside Park

"New Yorkers have learned to cope with life's worst vicissitudes, and this nil admirari attitude, they say, is one reason why New York considers itself a city of survivors. Only the fittest make it here. The unfit, having tried and failed, go home to Peoria, where they do just fine."
Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota

New York Mix

"In L. A., the problem is the wealth is so huge, and there are so many poor people, too, and they don't mix. They have the places where the white people hang out, the black people hang out, the Korean people hang out — and they don't cross over. In New York, they all mix, and nobody seems that different; they all have a hard time getting a cab. You can't tell who's got the money."
John Leguizamo, Los Angeles Magazine

From Unattainable to Commonplace

East 23rd

"New York is famously tough on its newcomers. For most of us -- whether born in Lubbock or Laos -- it is, at first glance, a source of endless intimidation, as indecipherable and unattainable as a well-bred East Coast lover. But time somehow collapses in New York, and within a decade the unattainable becomes commonplace, the love you feel for an impossible mistress turns into something like the love of a middle-aged child for an ailing parent."
Gary Shteyngart, The New York Times

Badge of Honor

West 14th

"Anyone who has spent a typical August in New York has often been confronted with the penetratingly pungent odor of roasting garbage, overripe in the ninety-plus degree noonday sun.  It's an odor you don't soon forget and a kind of badge of honor for those with enough temerity to spend time in New York during that stygian month."
Richard Goodman, A New York Memoir