“One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.”

“She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.”

“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.”

“I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.”

“That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.”

“...most people who've been around awhile know [love's] just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lost it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.”

“He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a t-shirt once that said: New York F***in City. As of it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.”