Loud and Fast

"New York, on the other hand, is loud and fast. There are apparently no walls in between the cheap apartments in Jessica's building. Tenants sneeze, use the bathrooms constantly, and argue. Horns honk without stopping and when someone speaks on one end of Manhattan you can hear them plainly on the other side of the island. It is one noisy-ass city."
Kris Radish, The Sunday List of Dreams

Vision Rising Out of the Sea

"To me New York is a vision that rises out of the sea as I come up the harbor on my Atlantic liner, and which glimmers for a while in the sun for the first of my stay amidst its pinnacles; but which vanishes, but for fragmentary glimpses, as I become one of the grey creatures that crawl about like ants, at the bottom of its gloomy caverns."
Alvin Langdon Coburn, quoted in Beyond the Architect's Eye

Ownership in Manhattan

"I don't want to be here, Paul. I want to be in Manhattan, where you don't own land: you own cubic feet fifty stories above the ground, like a normal person."
Jamie Buchman (Helen Hunt), Mad About You