“Already, with the city behind them, New York didn't feel quite real. As if reality only existed where she existed.”

“New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.”

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

“I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified.”

“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.”

“In the day school she went to in New York she had long intimate conversations with them all in her imagination, but never in reality.”