Glittering Gifts

Zuccotti Park

"Almost anything might happen to you in New York . . . the fabulous city like a great Christmas tree, so brilliantly lighted, with so many glittering gifts perpetually being handed out."
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Araby

"I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center-of-the-world, and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby."
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Sheer World

Manhattan (Bill Abbott / Wikimedia Commons)

"The way I saw it, the West Side was one long rectangle of apartment houses filled with artists and intellectuals; this richness, mirrored on the East Side by money and social standing, made the city glamorous, and painfully exciting. I could taste in my mouth world, sheer world. All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine."

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Human Expresiveness

"Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot."
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City