“The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in them and the white feathers were falling out. The city had untied all its bridges like so many buttons to feel at ease. Wherever there was a lamplight the city scratched itself until it went out.”

“Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. 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.”

“...a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.”

“The city was a machine of its own, continuously producing. We were constantly pumped out through its assembly line, in different forms or models. We came hardwired with different stories, dark secrets, vices, and defects. Over time, we fail and come to find our end, but the city continues onwards.”

“If the creek predates the city deep in time, then is it right to identify the creek solely with the city? The city has forgotten the creek, as it's forgotten those who walk its side, but the creek didn't need to be known all that long time before the city ever was. Maybe now Hogan's Creek is too steeped in history to claim an independence grounded in prehistory, because the city has too deeply poisoned it for far too long. Then again, there was all that time the creek flowed and had no name. Without a name you belong solely to yourself.”

“The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.”