quotations about New York
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
ANGELA CARTER
New Society
Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014
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
Midstream: My Later Life
You know what's great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it's great and you're having a good time and you haven't been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you know what? You're in!
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
The Layover
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 philosophical value than in the United States ... and when the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago 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
Bluebeard: A Novel
This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul ... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.
O. HENRY
"The Making of a New Yorker"
I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. 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 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.
JOAN DIDION
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.
LE CORBUSIER
When the Cathedrals Were White
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Forbes, 1992
Broadway, In ambuscades of light,
Drawing the charmed multitudes
With the slow suction of her breath--
Dangling her naked soul
Behind the blinding gold of eunuch lights
That wind about her like a bodyguard.
LOLA RIDGE
"Broadway"
New York is not just about heterogeneity, a quality other metropolises share. Neither is New York's cultural claim to cosmopolitanism particularly unique at this time in history. Other world cities exhibit similar signs of cultural cosmopolitanism, with fragments of different world cultures constituting the visual fabrics of their urban facades. What is worth studying about New York is its rigorous, democratic machine of political cosmopolitan citizenship. Becoming a New Yorker is not just about the consumption of multicultural sensations in a globally mediated environment. It is more challengingly about a set of performative engagements that activate and promote mutual respect and coexistence within the finite spaces of the metropolis. This socially contestatory, culturally volatile, yet rational endeavor is ultimately a utopian undertaking in political citizenship.
MAY JOSEPH
Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
America Day by Day
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
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
The bureaucracy of New York is an insane system of contending and competing private and public commissions and agencies, warring against each other, modeled on feudal fiefdoms. Acknowledging no central authority, each local lord pursues his own interests, eager to extend his decision-making dominion.
BARBARA ROSE
"Why No One Is Making New York Understandable", New York Magazine, September 25, 1972
People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.
LINDSEY KELK
I Heart New York
My hair is always at its best in New York. I don't know what's in the water. It could be mousse.
ELLEN DEGENERES
TV Guide, November 21-27, 2005
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
PETER SHAFFER
New York Times, April 13, 1975
For in that city, there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
EVELYN WAUGH
Brideshead Revisited
Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,
In a vesture of gold--
Spun of innumerable arcs,
Flaring and multiplying--
Gold at the uttermost circles fading
Into the tenderest hint of jade,
Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,
Robing the far-flung offices,
Scintillant-storied, forking flame,
Or soaring to luminous amethyst
Over the steeples aureoled.
LOLA RIDGE
"Manhattan"
New York is unfinished. But business goes on just the same. Business is continuous. Everything else in New York is subservient to business. If New York would only stop talking about its side shows, its buildings, its Broadway, its class, its style, its civic pride, and put a sign at every approach: BUSINESS GOING ON DURING ALTERATIONS, people would know what to expect and many outside visitors would be saved disappointment.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays