#york

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

#new-york-city

new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing. ↗

— E.B. White

#new-york-city

Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen. ↗

— Edward I. Koch

#new-york-city

Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey--a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing--streets and hot dogs and brusqueness--and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated. ↗

— Adam Gopnik

#home

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment. ↗

— Dorothy Parker

#humor #the-new-yorker #humor

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless. ↗

— Henry Miller

#love

Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car. ↗

— George Carlin

#humor #killing #los-angeles #new-york-city #subways

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

#business

New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too. ↗

— David Levithan

#living #new-york-city #freedom

I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#blasé #new-york-city #nonchalance #funny