Rabbit Holes

Anita's Way

"New York (and this is the source of its charm and its peculiar fascination) was then a city where anything seemed possible. Like the urban fabric, the social and cultural fabric was riddled with holes. All you had to do was pick one and slip through if, like Alice, you wanted to get to the other side of the looking glass and find worlds so enchanting that they seemed unreal."
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar

Oz

Manhattan skyline

"Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it -- a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't live in Oz, do you?"
Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate

Narcissus

Harlem Meer and Central Park North

"New York is the Narcissus among cities, ready to die for love of itself."
Frances Wilson, Travel Magazine

Ugly, Dirty, and Yet...

Brooklyn Bridge and downtown Manhattan

"New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it -- once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough."

John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

Square Foot

Walter Kerr Theatre

"Better a square foot of New York than all the rest of the world in a lump — better a lamppost on Broadway than the brightest star in the sky."
Texas Guinan, Texas Guinan: Queen of the Night Clubs

Bagels and Bullets

Equinox Fitness club

"I can be a true New Yorker. I'll go to the gym, and then I'll eat a bagel, and then... I'll shoot someone, maybe?"
Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

Magical Powers

Empire State Building

"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban nights are like the nights there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on magical powers."

Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound - American Writers 26

Great Times and Tall Deeds

Grand Central Terminal

"No matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds."

E.B. White, Essays of E. B. White

The Composition of a Mad Artist

Lower East Side

"A collage of disparate, violently-yoked-together elements, New York was the surreal composition of a mad artist."
E.L. Doctorow, Creationists

Chasing the Dragon

"The first month in New York for a newcomer has this certain amazing magic about it that is indescribable. Incandescent lucidity.  However long you stay in New York, you pretty much spent the rest of your time there trying to recapture that feeling. Chasing the Manhattan dragon."
Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

Heaven

Riverisde Park South

"To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying."
P.G. Wodehouse, America, I Like You

The New York Skyline

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline."
Ayn Rand, Fountainhead

Any Minute, Any Day, Any Month

Fifth Avenue Clock

"I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Before Moving to New York

Google

"If you are going to live in New York it is well first to take the precaution of being a millionaire."
George Warrington Steevens, The Land of the Dollar

Most Dramatic City

"New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying."
Cornell Woolrich, Manhattan Noir 2

Magnificent Jewel

"New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars."

Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock

Xanadu

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir

"New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu."
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Guest

Plaza Hotel

"To those who had something wonderful to give it, New York could be the kindest place in the world. But one did not want to show up there empty-handed. Regardless of residential status, one was always a guest there and one's standing always dependent upon the multitude and worth of one's offerings."
Hyatt Bass, The Embers

Reward and Punishment

Riverside Park South

"This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit."
Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

Wild Promise

"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby