Strangeness

Soho

"Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself."

Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

Philadelphia

Borough Hall subway station

"She took the subway out to Brooklyn. The borough seemed to her a Philadelphia rescued by adjacency to Manhattan."
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Yin and Yang

"New York's like the beady eye of yang at the center of the Midwest's unentitled, self-effacing plains of yin."
Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away

City of the Mind

Columbia University

"For the rest of the country New York is now largely a city of the mind — at best, a site for the voodoo transformation of image into flesh."
Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

Nowhere Better in the World

"There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City."
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

Filth and Rage

Mulberry St.

"In New York City you never had to go far to find filth and rage."
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections