New York City Quotes - Page 4

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant.
Francesca Lia Block
For those of you that truly believe there's no such thing as the mafiya, I would be more than happy to sell you your own fast lane on the Belt Parkway, you know, so you can avoid the rush hour commute. The mafiya is real as a heart attack and, contrary to popular consensus, has been steadily growing in power since its inception in the 1920s. Italian organized crime just doesn't operate out in the open anymore, former mayor Rudy made sure of that.
Gary "Gunz" Govich
Fear is the primary tool of the mafiya. It's how they contain their vast criminal enterprise. For the mafiya, fear is the grease in the wheel. Fear is much stronger than love | Fear lasts much longer. Love fades and is replaced by hatred and contempt. Fear lingers and brings forth other emotions such as doubt. Fear encourages procrastination and cowardice. Besides, you always hurt the ones you love. Most are too afraid to hurt the ones they fear.
Gary "Gunz" Govich
Another deputy threw down a clear plastic trash bag with my orange jumpsuit. I reached for the bag and was knocked down to the floor with an overhead right, another shove, and I was inside the 4X6 room. The heavy white door was already closing behind me. The walls here were made of hard white rubber. There was a small shower head towards the back of the tiny cell and a grated hole in the middle of the floor | I assumed that the hold would be my toilet. The cell reeked of anguish.
Gary "Gunz" Govich
Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church.
Gary "Gunz" Govich
The Jewish center on Kings Highway scheduled an interview at the local labor hall downtown for my father to meet one of their counselors in order to asses his skills and capabilities. When my father sat down with the fellow and asked all sorts of questions, his reply was a blank stare. Boris didn't understand a word. He did speak a little English | He knew two words, pipe and chair. So Boris did the smart thing. He kept saying pipe over and over. Whatever question, he simply replied... pipe. The counselor soon got the gist | Boris must be a plumber. He was handed a small slip of paper and was instructed to report to the address penciled on it at 6 am sharp the following day.
Gary "Gunz" Govich
Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.
o.henry
New York is the place where everyone will stop a championship fight to look at an usher giving a drunk the bum's rush.
Damon Runyon
My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.
Henry Miller
Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.- Frances Trollope (1827)
Frances Trollope
Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.
Kenneth Tynan
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.
Nigel Goslin
(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!
Camilla Monk
No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked.
Lisa Ko
My new life was unstable and unsure, but each new day was shot through with new possibility.
Lisa Ko
If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.
Sarah Vowell
Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.
Garth Risk Hallberg
For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.
Olivia Sudjic
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?
Olivia Sudjic
Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.
Olivia Sudjic
New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.
Siri Hustvedt
I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
The city was radiant and I felt untouchable.
Stephanie Danler
The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new management breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people. They believe the numbers say it all, and when the numbers don't say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.
Don Winslow
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.
Don Winslow
I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.
Elizabeth Strout
To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.
Dallas Athent
The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation that five times the population of any other portion of the country.
Malcolm Forbes
New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels. A person given to idleness, as Parvis has come to think of himself, must move about for the sake of moving, if only to fit into the general scheme of things - an electron obeying the current. Tantamount to movement, he has come to realize, is self-reliance, a fact reflected in the language: "Take care," a friend may say to another as the two part. In his old life the same two friends would have said to one another, khodahfez - "may God protect you.
Dalia Sofer
When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.
Neil Simon
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.
James Hillman
On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.
Edward Conlon
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
H.L. Mencken
That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.
Andrew Vachss
The Bronx? No Thonx!
Ogden Nash
New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up
E B White
It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.
Anna Godbersen
New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.
Thomas Jefferson
New York is a sucked orange.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.
H.G.Wells
Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.
Marilyn Vos Savant
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.
Saul Bellow
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?
Herman Melville
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.
Henry James
In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?
Mark Twain
Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough
John Steinbeck
Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.
Ann Douglas
Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.
Robert Moses
Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to the image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.
Melissa Febos
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
Irving Berlin
It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.
Susan Ertz
Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
Irwin Shaw
I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified.
Anita Weiss
City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
Leon Trotsky
New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say "These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.
Robert Benchley
New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.
Michael R. Bloomberg
New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
Christopher Morley

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