Unforgettable Love

Brooklyn Bridge (Pixaabay)

"That was the thing about New York. For most people who moved there from a smaller place, the way I did, things were never the same afterward. It was like a great love in your life that you could never forget, whether it had gone sour or not."

Janet Steen, Goodbye to All That

Grand Love Affair

Grand Central Terminal

"I'd entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan. I went willing to live there forever, to become one of the women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. I was ready for the city to sweep me into its arms, but instead it held me at a cool distance. And so I left New York the way one leaves a love affair too: because, much as I loved it, I wasn't truly in love. I had no compelling reason to stay."
Cheryl Strayed, Goodbye to All That

Superior

"I couldn't keep myself from thinking everything in New York was superior to every other place I'd ever been, which hadn't been all that many places. I was stunned by New York. Its grand parks and museums. Its cozy cobbled streets and dazzlingly bright thoroughfares. Its alternately efficient and appalling subway system. Its endlessly gorgeous women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats."
Cheryl Strayed, Goodbye to All That

Reckoning

Greenwich Street

"There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of."
Rayhané Sanders, Goodbye to All That

The City

Entrance to the PATH train

"To those of us who grew up not in it but next to it, in its shadow, a short train ride away on the Long Island Rail Road or the PATH or Metro North, New York is the city. As if there are no others. And for the rest of our lives, our relationship to cities will be defined by New York."
Lauren Elkin, Goodbye to All That

Bad Marriage

Dumbo

"I love New York. How could I not love a city that contains both Gray's Papaya and the Brooklyn Bridge? But maybe I too have been stuck in this bad marriage too long, hopelessly in love not with the city, the hard economic realities of it, the years of being part of the crowd, but with the skyline, that suggestion in lights that this place is both unreachable and a goal. That it is, in short, poetry. That is the city that pulls me, the city I carry around in my head."
Elizabeth Gold, Goodbye to All That