Actions Quotes Logo

New-york-city Quotes

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.New York is the city of envy, office work, and...

Show More

I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.

As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the b...

Show More
Picture of Colson Whitehead
Colson WhiteheadThe Colossus of New York

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Picture of Colson Whitehead
Colson WhiteheadThe Colossus of New York

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the...

Show More
Picture of Colson Whitehead
Colson WhiteheadThe Colossus of New York

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

Picture of Colson Whitehead
Colson WhiteheadThe Colossus of New York

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

Picture of Colson Whitehead
Colson WhiteheadThe Colossus of New York

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Picture of Colson Whitehead
Colson WhiteheadThe Colossus of New York

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

Picture of Colson Whitehead
Colson WhiteheadThe Colossus of New York

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place ...

Show More

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a w...

Show More
Picture of Colum McCann
Colum McCannLet the Great World Spin

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a w...

Show More
Picture of Colum McCann
Colum McCannLet the Great World Spin

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

New York is the place where everyone will stop a championship fight to look at an usher giving a dru...

Show More

How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm?Why don't you stay sober today?We didn't come to New...

Show More

It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the...

Show More
Picture of David Sedaris
David SedarisMe Talk Pretty One Day

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that some...

Show More

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrit...

Show More

I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they've ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn't k...

Show More

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds ...

Show More

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

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspi...

Show More

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance...

Show More

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should co...

Show More

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage pile...

Show More
Picture of Edmund White
Edmund WhiteCity Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

Picture of Edmund White
Edmund WhiteCity Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to youn...

Show More
Picture of Edmund White
Edmund WhiteCity Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy...

Show More
Picture of Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn WaughBrideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as i...

Show More

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wi...

Show More

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - bec...

Show More

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enou...

Show More

Our grief is not a cry for war."That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombi...

Show More

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does

To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New...

Show More

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes...

Show More

New York: A third-rate Babylon.

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy wo...

Show More
Picture of Helen Keller
Helen KellerMidstream: My Later Life

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks diff...

Show More

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doc...

Show More

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the...

Show More
Picture of Henry James
Henry JamesWashington Square

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in...

Show More
Picture of Henry James
Henry JamesWashington Square

My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints t...

Show More

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and f...

Show More

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to sham...

Show More

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the di...

Show More

New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the g...

Show More
Picture of James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon JohnsonThe Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not lo...

Show More

Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get outof here."She snorted. "Li...

Show More

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my w...

Show More

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, ...

Show More
Picture of Joan Didion
Joan DidionSlouching Towards Bethlehem

Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how l...

Show More

There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was he...

Show More

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying,...

Show More

I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists]

Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten ...

Show More
Picture of John Steinbeck
John SteinbeckAmerica and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, ki...

Show More

Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, t...

Show More

Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives...

Show More
Picture of Kathy Acker
Kathy AckerEurydice in the Underworld

Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a ...

Show More

A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I'd die for m...

Show More

I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.

Picture of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence FerlinghettiA Coney Island of the Mind

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catast...

Show More

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral phil...

Show More

On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.

The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation that five times the pop...

Show More

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. ...

Show More

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, de...

Show More

In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who w...

Show More

Guys like you can't escape the city. Hell, you a got a blood contract with this place. You're marrie...

Show More
Picture of Mickey Spillane
Mickey SpillaneKiss Her Goodbye: An Otto Penzler Book

The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independen...

Show More
Picture of Milan Kundera
Milan KunderaThe Unbearable Lightness of Being

When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los An...

Show More

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything i...

Show More

Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bou...

Show More

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing arou...

Show More

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.

It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.

Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I str...

Show More
Picture of O. Henry
O. HenryThe Complete Works of O. Henry

Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.

What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?

I'm bound to say that New York's a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, ...

Show More

I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon real...

Show More

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.