New York City Quotes

New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.

New York is a granite beehive, where people jostle and whir like molecules in an overheated jar. Houston is six suburbs in search of a center.

Fear not your flame as you flood your caverns with firelight.

Knowing even as I craved permanence in New York City, that would never come to pass. The pair of us would live for as long as we could. As well as well could. That was all. Then we'd blow away like wishes made on dandelion heads.

I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it--a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you?

What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.

If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation, you’re thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I’ve never been more bored by casual chat.

Enjoy your cinnafucks!

Experiment with grounding yourself with who you are, not what you do.

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Polonius, you sometimes have to get your hands a little dirty to set things straight.

The city is the size of a country, but has been operated like a candy store.

Look at it,' he said, gesturing. 'This window looks down upon hundreds more panes of glass, and behind those panes live thousands upon thousands of lost souls. When I feel cast down and helpless, scores of other men do as well, and when I am bitterly angry at feeling cast down and helpless, countless other people languish in concert with me. When I'm happy, it's the same. It's a bit like...I used to play chamber music. It's like a vast orchestra. And so I shan't ever be alone.

I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings.

Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper.

New insights from being present are a gift.

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish

You haven't lived until you died in New York.

Everything is going as planned until I notice that Ashley has barely touched her wine glass or food after ordering the priciest bottle and several of the most expensive dishes on the menu.From "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

There were a few nighttime pedestrians on the block, but they continued on their way, dutifully ignoring the zombie vomiting blood out of the back of my car. Good old New Yorkers. They really couldn't care less.

Fuck the Bureau! Their entire outfit is half the size of the NYPD. I've got more officers who speak Arabic in one precinct that you guys have in the entire D.O.D.!

Summer sticks to her skirt sumptuously, in the shiny gray fabric hanging loosely from her curves. Her chestnut eyes, apparently hidden from strangers; her simple but graceful face, unpainted by Madison Avenue; and her straight black hair, parted down the middle without ego, all suggest a minimalist - almost pastoral - beauty that is oddly discordant with her fashionable attire, comfortable indifference to the crowds, and quasi-attentive perusal of the Time magazine unfolded over her hand.

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia.

Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man from back home is talking, you better listen closely. (Dark City Lights)

Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn’t know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror.

As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to reconnect with a long-held love.

What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

I wanted solitude, but a treasure like that didn't exist in the city. I only found silence in Central Park, still littered with people of course, but the only place that held moments of calm. I breathed in that wonderful silence as my pace finally slowed, and nature delighted my senses.

The Bronx? No Thonx!

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.

These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.

I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.

Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City.

But I did feel the vertigo of death’s invitation, beckoning me towards the dark waters below. Only a newfound perspective and desire steadied my wavering soul. I came to realize, just in time, that suicide was far too easy – and obscenely cowardly – after someone I knew, not even half my age, had been through so much worse and still marched gloriously on.

Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.

If it’s true we only live once, then raise your red velvet curtain every chance you get.

New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.

My past still haunts me when I sleep, although I saw that - much to my surprise- his does as well.

It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.

(Regarding the Roosevelt Tram along Queensboro Bridge):"They had it renovated by the French. French cars. French cables. Cables that surrender! Would you ride in a tram that surrenders? I sure as hell wouldn't!

He clearly suffers from some past traumas too, so hopefully he'll understand why I was untruthful to him about mine.

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

In a supersonic jet, you'll land before you take off. Your watch - if it's working right - will go back. (It'll stop if it's not). You've made a journey forwards and backwards at the same time. The trip will make you younger.

Setting that little girl loose in her society would be like putting a fox in with the chickens. (Violet Strange's detective boss.)

History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights)

This was a quarrel they did not need | It was one they knew they could never win. Beat us with a bat and we come back with Jiggers | Stick us with a knife and we bring the heaters | Plug one of us, and you'd better murder us all. We were the authentic spectacle, and the fact they left with their lives intact, no bones broken, or a limb missing, was miracle enough.

We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.

If Audrey sensed what he was contemplating, her silence did not let on. He turned from the window and found her looking at him with a flawless poker face. It may have been attentiveness and curiosity to hear what he would say next, or perhaps she was expecting from him what women throughout the ages, often against their better judgment, had expected of men.

With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city's many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air!

Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper.

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

From the depths of your well, tap your will.

Be courageous: be still.