quotations about New York
New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.
HARRY HERSHFIELD
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/n/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37
attributed, Rand Lindsly's Quotations
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"
In vain does the stranger look for the New Yorker type, the man of the classy magazines. Instead he sees nervous, gaunt-faced men by day, and evening-clothed, dull-eyed, prematurely old men at night, hurrying, hustling, scrambling, rushing, wither nobody knows.
WILLIAM HENRY MCMASTERS
"On New York--A City In Process", Originality and Other Essays
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
To outsiders, it may seem that that fusion of souls called New Yorkers has arthritis in its middle finger from overuse. But it is merely people's way of greeting each other as they run around like ferrets on double espressos with little or no time to make illiterate requests upon the art of conversation.
BERT RANDOLPH SUGAR
introduction, The Ultimate Book of New York Lists
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
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
New York, you got money on your mind
And my words won't make a dime's worth a difference, so here's to you New York.
ART GARFUNKEL
A Heart in New York
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
ANGELA CARTER
New Society
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
People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.
LINDSEY KELK
I Heart New York
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
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
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
PETER SHAFFER
New York Times, April 13, 1975
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
The Last Olympian
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
The power to run New York is ephemeral; the structure rests on unsure foundations. The ten men who run New York do not combine their power, the group changes, month to month and year to year.
EDWARD N. COSTIKYAN
"Who Runs New York?", New York Magazine, December 23, 1968
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
Old New York City is a friendly old town
From Washington Heights to Harlem on down
There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around
They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down
It's hard times in the city
Livin' down in New York town
BOB DYLAN
"Hard Times in New York Town"
New York is a woman, holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand, and strangling the earth with the other.
ALI AHMAD SAID
"The Funeral of New York"