New York Quotes

Oh ParisFrom red to green all the yellow dies awayParis Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orangeThe beautiful fruit of light("Windows")

Guillaume Apollinaire

Oh no. I split my time between Paris and New York. They're the only places to really live.

Naomi Wood

Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.

James Baldwin

I guess it goes to show that you just never know where life will take you. You search for answers. You wonder what it all means. You stumble, and you soar. And, if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while.

Amy Thomas

I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.

Anaïs Nin

In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.

Anna Godbersen

New York had saved him, in a very real way. It had pushed and prodded him with its impatient and sharp fingers, reminding him on a daily basis during that jittery first year that it didn't really give a goddamn whether he sank or swam. He liked its selfishness and its generosity and its propensity for flipping the bird to the rest of the world.

Nora Roberts

As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.

Jardine Libaire

I don't know what to do about him, Sammy." (Jackie)"It's not what you do about him. It's what you do with him. Grab him by those big, manly arms that I'm assuming he has, and show him what New York has to offer.

Ali Novak

How is it that we can punish women who are paid by politicians yet allow freedom and forgiveness to the politicians who pay them? The irony of the situation is that if we allow Sptizer’s deep pockets to buy his way back into our homes and hearts, then it’s not young women he hired who are whores, it’s the people of New York.

Valerie Baber

[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening-and he was among the victors!

Tom Wolfe

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.

Thomas Wolfe

Never mind gas masks and fallout shelters in the event of biological warfare. Many New Yorkers move from place to place equipped with the essentials of vermin assault weaponry: mouse traps, roach spray, and sticky tapes. In some neighborhoods, it’s a must.

Isabel Lopez

Everyone in New York City thinks they are famous without being famous.

Ethan H. Minsker

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.

Zdeněk Mahler

Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.

Kathy Acker

You might find me cleverly clad, in black on black, at 28th and 7th Ave.

Jonathan P. Lamas

The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.

Luc Sante

My main concern while in New York wasn't becoming a hot shot. I was more concerned with staying alive, and that took all the pleasure out of the experience. I didn't know where to find a grocery store so I subsisted on hot dogs, peanuts and whatever else I could buy from a street vendor. I didn't know how to hail a cab (apparently there's an art to it). I stood on the edge of the sidewalk and waved my arms around but no one stopped, so I limited my entire universe to however far I could walk and I never walked too far because I was afraid I'd get lost and never find my way back home again. Perhaps that's why there are so many homeless people in New York; maybe they're not really lost, maybe some of them have homes but they just don't know how to get there.

Marlin Bressi

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.

Stephanie Clifford

Slowly the sky turned from the color of cornflower to that of hyacinth, and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island appeared like a ring of diamonds against the twilight. New York-that city made of canyons between tall buildings, and ornate houses filled with glittering things that might trap a girl forever-was nothing more than a few dots on an infinite landscape. The atmosphere was crystalline and afforded her a perfect view. Only from this place was she able to see how limited the city was, after everything, and how wide open the world could all of a sudden become.

Anna Godbersen

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

Brian Koppelman

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)

Brian Koppelman

A New York plate that said you die. (Dark City Lights)

Ed Park

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

David Levien

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.

Nora Ephron

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

To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.

Dallas Athent

Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.

Ann Douglas

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Ayn Rand

The rhythm of a New York summer is passionate and powerful, evoking a rapid calypso, with July being the musical climax.

Ashley Pullo

Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.

Stephanie Clifford

She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open doorof the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.

Kristen Henderson

He smiled that smile again. How could something so lazy do such busy things to her body?

Amy Andrews

Faith had no idea if he meant liquor, sex or a game of twister but she was up for all three.

Amy Andrews

He was a Crosby, Stills and Nash song. He loved the one he was with. He was casual with a capital C.

Amy Andrews

I’m going to drag you down to the basement, kneel at your feet, rip your jeans down and I’m going to make you come so hard with my tongue the whole damn pub will think you’re being murdered.

Amy Andrews

Faith was certain they were breaking several telecommunications laws. Laws that in some states might well count as pornography and probably carried a mandatory prison sentence. Faith was a law abiding citizen. She prided herself on that. She didn’t litter, she didn’t cheat on her taxes and she gave up her seat for little old ladies and gentlemen on the bus. She’d never even jaywalked. tAnd she lived in New York for Christ’s sake! tBut then his hand reached down and fondled his balls.

Amy Andrews

He thought there was chemistry? Faith had always hated chemistry at school but if she’d known a sexy Australian was going to seduce her with it in the future she may have paid more attention.

Amy Andrews

He looked down at her and their gazes meshed for long moments. “I was wrong before. You’re definitely the best part.” Faith’s breath stuttered in her lungs. Nobody had ever said anything so damn romantic to her in her life. She’d been told she was gorgeous and beautiful and sexy by men who’d been keen to get her into bed but she’d never been told she was the best part of anybody’s anything.

Amy Andrews

When one good thing happened to you, other good things seemed to follow.

Candace Bushnell

But that was the problem with New York: No matter how succesful you thought you were, there was always someone who was richer, more successful, more famous.. The idea of it was sometimes enough to make you want to give up.

Candace Bushnell

That was the wonderful thing about New York: Years of bad blood could be wiped out with a single gesture of friendliness.

Candace Bushnell

Beware what you consume, lest you appetite grow by what it feeds on.

Candace Bushnell

It's bewildering to me how you can just start chatting with a complete stranger on Facebook, and - next thing you know - it seems as if there's some intense connection with the person - or at least you feel that closeness and hope it's mutual

Zack Love

Paradoxically, the more Michael kept me at a distance, the more I trusted him - perhaps because he was always willing to help me with tips and introductions even though he wanted absolutely nothing from me (and never reciprocated my nosiness with personal questions of his own with me).

Zack Love

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

Pearl S. Buck

Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren't any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn't need one. (Dark City Lights)

Peter Carlaftes

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!

Edith Wharton

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke

The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage, like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. (Dark City Lights)

Tom Callahan

It reminded me of what Dad said after every snail’s crawl home fromAlbany when snow hit.“It’s New York, people. It’s winter. We get snow. If you aren’t preparedto deal with it, move to Miami.

Kelley Armstrong

Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?

Christopher Hitchens

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 red 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. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has brought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.

Francesca Lia Block

I slept badly that night, my vivid dreams populated by ghosts. As much as it revived ailing spirits in day light, the fizzy energy of NY seemed to feed on human frailty at night.

Pete Townshend

Growing up in NYC,The broken sidewalks, graffiti filled subways, and humid Laundromats, did not offer solace. I found solace in the strings of my violin, in my ballet slippers at the studio, and while gazing at frescoes in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was always in the Arts that my soul was replenished.

Susan Anne Russell

I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.

Melanie Benjamin

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

Joan Didion

By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience- if they did they would live elsewhere.

E B White

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New York Quotes

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