New York Landing

JFK airport

"She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours."
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Eight Million Stories

Rose Main Reading Room

"New York is such a vibrant place to write about. Eight million stories colliding all at once. And what a landscape to operate in. The eye never gets tired."
Colum McCann, Conversations with Colum McCann

Bravado

 "One of the things he used to love about New York City was the sheer bravado of it all. It used you up, spat you out."
Colum McCann, Thirteen Ways of Looking

Built Upon Something Else

Ninth Avenue

"Everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected."
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Disgusting and Wonderful

Prince Street

"I miss New York and all the places and everyone and everything and especially the Lower East Side, it was it was so disgusting, so wonderful."
Colum McCann, Dancer

Fiction of Sorts

42nd Street Subway Station

"New York is a fiction of sorts, a construct, a story, into which you can walk at any moment and at any angle, and end up blindsided, turned upside down, changed."
Colum McCann, My First New York

Forward

Forward Building

"New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey."
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Soul Shaking

Conservatory Garden

"New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief."
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin