Silence

Alphabet City

"What can New York—noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, stormy, turbulent New York—have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all-swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool, the strife and the warfare, and the fever and the trembling— who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose, the hushed lethargy of silence?"
Walt Whitman, The Journalism: 1834-1846

Bigger than Life

"The world pours into Times Square. Like lost souls emerging from the purgatory of the trains (dark rattling tunnels, smelly pornographic toilets, newsstands futilely splashing the subterranean graydepths with unreal magazine colors), the newyork faces push into the air: spilling into 42nd Street and Broadway — a scattered defeated army. And the world of that street bursts like a rocket into a shattered phosphorescent world. Giant signs—Bigger! Than! Life!—blink off and on."
John Rechy, City of Night

Bright Lights, Big City

"Amy gazed in wonder at the New York skyline, gleaming in the night sky. If anything, it looked bigger at night. A vast tribute to human might, with office lights shining far brighter than the stars and galaxies above. It was true what they said: bright lights, big city."
Brian Minchin, Doctor Who: The Forgotten Army