New York City, the concrete jungle where dreams are made, has long been a muse for writers, artists, and thinkers across the globe. Its vibrant energy, diverse culture, and iconic skyline have inspired countless reflections, each capturing a unique facet of the city's magnetic allure. Whether you're drawn to its pulse-pounding streets, its rich tapestry of cultures, or the serenity one finds in the midst of its chaos, New York offers something for everyone. In this collection of 141 quotes, we delve into the words of those who have been captivated by the city's charm, offering insights that range from the profound to the playful. Get ready to be inspired by the voices that celebrate the essence of the Big Apple, a place like no other.
1. “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
2. “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
3. “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
4. “One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.” - Terry Pratchett
5. “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
6. “What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?” - P.G. Wodehouse
7. “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
8. “Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.” - Dorothy Parker
9. “This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me” - Walt Whitman
10. “Chapter 1.He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion...no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yeah. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.'Uh, no let me start this over.'Chapter 1.He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles...'. Ah, corny, too corny for my taste. Can we ... can we try and make it more profound?'Chapter 1.He adored New York City. For him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in...'No, that's going to be too preachy. I mean, you know, let's face it, I want to sell some books here.'Chapter 1.He adored New York City, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage...'Too angry, I don't want to be angry.'Chapter 1.He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.'I love this.'New York was his town, and it always would be.” - Woody Allen
11. “new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.” - E.B. White
12. “New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.” - Bob Dylan
13. “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
14. “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
15. “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
16. “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
17. “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
18. “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” - Tom Wolfe
19. “I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.” - colum mccann
20. “He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.” - Ayn Rand
21. “Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.” - Jonathan Franzen
22. “...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.” - Evelyn Waugh
23. “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
24. “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
25. “Sure.” Olivia smirked. “Good ol’ New York Public Library. I’m sure it’s up to date on the latest Demons that escape through well-guarded Demon Gates.” - Cheyenne McCray
26. “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
27. “There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.” - Jonathan Lethem
28. “"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
29. “I'm bound to say that New York's a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I'm a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.” - P.G. Wodehouse
30. “people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.” - Joseph O'Neill
31. “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
32. “The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.” - Philip Hone
33. “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
34. “New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls.” - Kurt Wenzel
35. “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
36. “Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.” - Willa Cather
37. “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
38. “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
39. “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
40. “So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.” - Kurt Vonnegut
41. “Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.” - Teju Cole
42. “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
43. “New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something” - Lindsey Kelk
44. “I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists] live.Where's that?Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there.” - John McCain
45. “Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.” - O. Henry
46. “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
47. “I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
48. “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
49. “Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.” - Ann Douglas
50. “The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.” - Moss Hart
51. “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
52. “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
53. “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
54. “It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.” - O. Henry
55. “The city was different back then--poor and crumbling--kept alive only by the gritty determination and steely cynicism of its occupants. But underneath the dirt was the apple-cheeked optimism of possibility, and while she worked, the whole city seemed to throb along with her.” - Candace Bushnell
56. “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
57. “The city is the size of a country, but has been operated like a candy store.” - Ed Koch
58. “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 S. Forbes
59. “Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.” - Ed Koch
60. “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
61. “When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.” - Jimmy Breslin
62. “Is a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when The New York Times prints it, it's a sociological study.[Adolph S. Ochs - Publisher New York Times]” - Adolph S. Ochs
63. “You haven't lived until you died in New York.” - Alexander Woollcott
64. “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
65. “My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New York City?” - Henny Youngman
66. “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
67. “The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.” - Ed Koch
68. “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
69. “No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.” - Michael Bloomberg
70. “I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.” - Joan Didion
71. “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
72. “Skyscraper National Park” - Kurt Vonnegut
73. “Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough” - John Steinbeck
74. “It's a city where everbody mutinies but no one deserts.” - Harry Hershfield
75. “New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.” - Truman Capote
76. “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
77. “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
78. “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
79. “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
80. “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
81. “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
82. “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
83. “Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.” - Marilyn Vos Savant
84. “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
85. “New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American” - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
86. “Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.” - Irving Berlin
87. “East Side, West Side, all around the town,The tots sang "Ring-a-rosie, London Bridge is falling Down;Boys and Girls together, me and Mamie O'Rorke, Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.” - james w. blake
88. “If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish” - Lennie Bruce
89. “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
90. “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
91. “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
92. “There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.” - Simone de Beauvoir
93. “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
94. “New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East” - John Gregory Dunne
95. “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
96. “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
97. “New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.” - Thomas Jefferson
98. “A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.” - Le Corbusier
99. “My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.” - Henry Miller
100. “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
101. “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
102. “It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.” - O. Henry
103. “If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.” - Arthur C. Clarke
104. “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
105. “New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.” - James Weldon Johnson
106. “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
107. “On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.” - Lewis Grizzard
108. “Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, 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-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?” - Walt Whitman
109. “The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” - E.B. White
110. “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
111. “Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.” - O. Henry
112. “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.” - Fran Lebowitz
113. “New York: A third-rate Babylon.” - H.L. Mencken
114. “People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.” - Lindsey Kelk
115. “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
116. “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
117. “It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.” - Susan Ertz
118. “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
119. “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
120. “Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.” - O. Henry
121. “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
122. “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
123. “To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.” - Cat Agonis
124. “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
125. “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
126. “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
127. “Waiting for a hot pocket to cook we’d fuck and be satisfied, barefoot on new york city apartment linoleum. A satisfying hot pocket and a big ass smile and a tight ass grip and a wall beside a random pipe beside the stove where we left palm and dick prints. We fucked like this. Three condoms in an hour and a half and where are you now? Holding the hand of some local dude you wish was a little more international, wishing you had known I was enough and asked me to stay. You are standing in the kitchen waiting for popcorn to pop while he washes dishes, not knowing I’m wishing back for you.” - Darnell Lamont Walker
128. “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
129. “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
130. “It cannot be done all at once. To overpower vertigo - the keeper of the abyss- one must tame it, cautiously.” - Philippe Petit
131. “That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.” - Amor Towles
132. “Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.” - James Baldwin
133. “Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.” - T.A
134. “Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!” - Walt Whitman
135. “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
136. “The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern.” - Mickey Wyte
137. “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
138. “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
139. “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
140. “[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
141. “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
