131 New York City Quotes

New York City, often referred to as "The City That Never Sleeps," is a melting pot of cultures, dreams, and iconic landmarks. From the bustling streets of Times Square to the serene paths of Central Park, NYC has inspired countless writers, artists, and thinkers to encapsulate its essence in words. Whether you're seeking inspiration, reminiscing about a past visit, or planning your next adventure, these handpicked quotes about New York City are sure to captivate your imagination and give you a glimpse into the unparalleled magic of the Big Apple. Dive in and explore our curated collection of the top 131 quotes that celebrate the spirit, energy, and allure of this world-renowned metropolis.

1. “Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.” - Helen Keller

2. “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

3. “I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.” - Truman Capote

4. “If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.” - Peter Shaffer

5. “What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?” - P.G. Wodehouse

6. “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?” - Woody Allen

7. “Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.” - Dorothy Parker

8. “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” - John Updike

9. “This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me” - Walt Whitman

10. “new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.” - E.B. White

11. “But what Dakota most enjoyed about the beginning of winter was the crispness of the air (that practically demanded the wearing of knits) and the way that tough New Yorkers - on the street, in elevators, in subways - were suddenly willing to risk a smile. To make a connection with a stranger. To finally see one another after strenuously avoiding eye contact all year.” - Kate Jacobs

12. “It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.” - Maeve Brennan

13. “Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.” - Joseph O'Neill

14. “The safest day at the Melody is St. Paddy's," adds another Mardi Gras girl. "All the cops are out vomiting at the parade.” - Josh Alan Friedman

15. “You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.” - COLSON WHITEHEAD

16. “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” - Tom Wolfe

17. “Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” - Nora Ephron

18. “I hate Brooklyn.” - Cassandra Clare

19. “Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.” - Jonathan Franzen

20. “...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.” - Evelyn Waugh

21. “He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.” - Arthur Phillips

22. “It is at least as possible for a Philadelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and Becket. Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.” - G.K. Chesterton

23. “It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. They’d put a good face one it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friend making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.” - David Sedaris

24. “"The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn't matter if you are younger or old. Reading our rich history makes the experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves. For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias. That's why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city's magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it's your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze."” - Pete Hamill

25. “The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.” - Philip Hone

26. “New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.” - Peter Cameron

27. “New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls.” - Kurt Wenzel

28. “You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the first island they took over.” - Andrew Vachss

29. “Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.” - Willa Cather

30. “I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it's so bright and so dark at the same time, just knowing there are three thousand people out there longing to be swept away by the passion that's about to flood out from scarlet curtains, to this I consecrate my body and my soul, I can give no more than all of myself, I feel my heart is a throbbing engine and my voice is the valve, like a wailing train, it has to sing or blow up, there's too much fuel, too much fire, and what am I to do with this voice if I can't let it out, it's not just singing. I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me. I am in love. But not with a person. I am passionately in love with my life.” - Ann-Marie MacDonald

31. “Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view.” - Ann-Marie MacDonald

32. “I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.” - Richard Price

33. “My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.” - Walter Kirn

34. “A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I'd die for my fans.” - Lady Gaga

35. “New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.” - John Steinbeck

36. “I had always been warned that American didn't always get sarcasm” - Lindsey Kelk

37. “New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something” - Lindsey Kelk

38. “Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.” - O. Henry

39. “I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.” - Nora Ephron

40. “I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

41. “People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.” - Sean Hannity

42. “Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.” - Ann Douglas

43. “The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)” - Tara Leigh Cobble

44. “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

45. “The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.” - Henry James

46. “Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.” - Henry James

47. “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

48. “True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.” - Jimmy Breslin

49. “If one is looking for cultural testosterone and raging off-the-wall competition in the world of communications, Manhattan was - and is - home plate.” - Brock Yates

50. “The city is the size of a country, but has been operated like a candy store.” - Ed Koch

51. “The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.” - Frank Rich

52. “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

53. “There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.” - Elbert Hubbard

54. “When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.” - Jimmy Breslin

55. “Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.” - Robert Benchley

56. “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

57. “New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.” - Anna Quindlen

58. “I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City .” - Spalding Gray

59. “No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.” - Michael Bloomberg

60. “Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love.” - Pete Hamill

61. “New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.” - Léopold Sédar Senghor

62. “Skyscraper National Park” - Kurt Vonnegut

63. “It's a city where everbody mutinies but no one deserts.” - Harry Hershfield

64. “New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.” - Truman Capote

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.” - Irwin Shaw

68. “New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.” - Russell Baker

69. “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

70. “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

71. “Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does” - Groucho Marx

72. “Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.” - Marilyn Vos Savant

73. “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

74. “If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish” - Lennie Bruce

75. “As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.” - Pearl S. Buck

76. “Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.” - Albert Camus

77. “When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read” - G.K. Chesterton

78. “The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.” - Theodore Dreiser

79. “New York is a sucked orange.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

80. “I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

81. “New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.” - Ford Madox Ford

82. “New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is.” - Henry Ford

83. “A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.” - Le Corbusier

84. “My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.” - Henry Miller

85. “New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle;Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness….There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory inTheir skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.” - Christopher Morley

86. “And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.” - Willie Morris

87. “Vulgar of manner, overfed,Overdressed and underbred;Heartless, Godless, hell's delight,Rude by day and lewd by night…Crazed with avarice, lust and rum,New York, thy name's delirium.” - Byron Rufus Newton

88. “It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.” - O. Henry

89. “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

90. “If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.” - Arthur C. Clarke

91. “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

92. “No other place can so convincingly claim to be the capital of capitalism, the capital of the 20th century and the capital of the world.” - Kenneth T. Jackson

93. “On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.” - Lewis Grizzard

94. “The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas.” - Vincent Scully

95. “Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.” - O. Henry

96. “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

97. “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.” - Fran Lebowitz

98. “New York: A third-rate Babylon.” - H.L. Mencken

99. “People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.” - Lindsey Kelk

100. “You cannot keep something down that is bound to rise.” - Juliet C. Obodo

101. “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

102. “Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get outof here."She snorted. "Like hell.""I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.” - Jim Butcher

103. “I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.” - Jim Butcher

104. “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.” - Charles Whibley

105. “Chance is life's only certainty.” - Mickey Wyte

106. “Having grown up here, I always wonder what it would be like to see this city as a tourist. Is it ever a disappointment? I have to believe that New York always lives up to its reputation. The buildings really are that tall. The lights really are that bright. There's truly a story on every corner. But it still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions. To not feel the bright lights even as they fill the air. To see the tall buildings and only feel a deep longing for the stars.” - David Levithan

107. “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.” - O. Henry

108. “Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.” - O. Henry

109. “But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn't feel any passion to write about the place. I didn't give a damn about local politics; I wasn't moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world was a centre and that centre was here. ‘The world's a sphere, everyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘The centre of a sphere doesn't lie on its surface. Look up the word 'superficial', when you have a chance.” - Mohsin Hamid

110. “I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they've ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn't know, because I won't ever dare ask that question.” - Dylan Thomas

111. “To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.” - Cat Agonis

112. “When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.” - Ada Louise Huxtable

113. “It wasn’t so much that I thought there was nowhere to go, in this huge city; but with so many places to go, where were you supposed to begin?” - Kelly Braffet

114. “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

115. “New York lesson 1 - never look lost. Lesson 2 - forget hallowed silences. It's the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.” - Alison Fell

116. “We played this game from the west village to the upper east side til around midnight when the Chrysler building was far behind us and we weren’t sure if we were in love anymore.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

117. “Jason woke to a feeling of fear, borne from a dream that he couldn’t remember when waking. But as his mind focused, he found the dream right before him. The half-woman lay perfectly molded against his body, her wings draped down her back.” - Derendrea

118. “In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.” - Anna Quindlen

119. “Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.” - T.A

120. “Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!” - Walt Whitman

121. “Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.” - Amor Towles

122. “The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern.” - Mickey Wyte

123. “The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out - everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

124. “New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

125. “Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in.The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground.Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again.Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get.This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

126. “In New York, the buildings are like mountains in some ways, but they are only alive because of the people living in them. Real mountains are alive all over.” - Silas House

127. “If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.” - Amor Towles

128. “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

129. “[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

130. “She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating.” - Sarah Pekkanen

131. “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.” - Iain M. Banks