New York City Quotes

(Regarding the Roosevelt Tram along Queensboro Bridge):They had it renovated by the French. French cars. French cables. Cables that surrender! Would you ride in a tram that surrenders? I sure as hell wouldn't!

~ Camilla Monk

No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked.

~ Lisa Ko

My new life was unstable and unsure, but each new day was shot through with new possibility.

~ Lisa Ko

If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.

~ Sarah Vowell

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.

~ Olivia Sudjic

Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?

~ Olivia Sudjic

Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.

~ Olivia Sudjic

New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

The city was radiant and I felt untouchable.

~ Stephanie Danler

The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new management breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people. They believe the numbers say it all, and when the numbers don't say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.

~ Don Winslow

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia.

~ Don Winslow

I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.

~ Elizabeth Strout

New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.

~ Tom Waits

Knowing even as I craved permanence in New York City, that would never come to pass. The pair of us would live for as long as we could. As well as well could. That was all. Then we'd blow away like wishes made on dandelion heads.

~ Lyndsay Faye

And yet, there will always be something essentially elsewhere about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn't ever fully offer itself. It's intoxicating. Keeps you on your toes. Keeps you drinking coffee and keeps you walking.

~ Becky Cooper

I said, It really didn't feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?

~ Stephanie Danler

Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city.

~ Becky Cooper

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)

~ Robert A. Caro

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.

~ Sari Botton

The warm humid air of New York clung to the night, unwilling to relinquish its suffocating hold. And yet to Eva, the city had an underlying hum of possibility; a constant forward motion that promised, no matter what, that change was on its way.

~ Kathleen Tessaro

We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.

~ Marisha Pessl

Another funny thing about living in this city is how easy it can be to lose track of people. We're all so busy, always rushing around, so wrapped up in our own stuff. It stops occurring to us to check in with friends. I mean REALLY check in with them.

~ Ryan Kelly

Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbsabout what was happeningin the metropolis, realizing,in the scorched plum of dusk,actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....

~ Kristen Henderson

Disrespect one of our associates and face the penalty | This was our creed. There should have been corpses floating that cold September eve. This was the perfect place to do it, too, in the middle of the ocean where gunfire goes unheard and chopped up limbs and torsos would be lucky to survive the predators and float onto a beach weeks or even months later.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

This was a quarrel they did not need | It was one they knew they could never win. Beat us with a bat and we come back with Jiggers | Stick us with a knife and we bring the heaters | Plug one of us, and you'd better murder us all. We were the authentic spectacle, and the fact they left with their lives intact, no bones broken, or a limb missing, was miracle enough.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant.

~ Francesca Lia Block

For those of you that truly believe there's no such thing as the mafiya, I would be more than happy to sell you your own fast lane on the Belt Parkway, you know, so you can avoid the rush hour commute. The mafiya is real as a heart attack and, contrary to popular consensus, has been steadily growing in power since its inception in the 1920s. Italian organized crime just doesn't operate out in the open anymore, former mayor Rudy made sure of that.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

Fear is the primary tool of the mafiya. It's how they contain their vast criminal enterprise. For the mafiya, fear is the grease in the wheel. Fear is much stronger than love | Fear lasts much longer. Love fades and is replaced by hatred and contempt. Fear lingers and brings forth other emotions such as doubt. Fear encourages procrastination and cowardice. Besides, you always hurt the ones you love. Most are too afraid to hurt the ones they fear.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

Another deputy threw down a clear plastic trash bag with my orange jumpsuit. I reached for the bag and was knocked down to the floor with an overhead right, another shove, and I was inside the 4X6 room. The heavy white door was already closing behind me. The walls here were made of hard white rubber. There was a small shower head towards the back of the tiny cell and a grated hole in the middle of the floor | I assumed that the hold would be my toilet. The cell reeked of anguish.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

The Jewish center on Kings Highway scheduled an interview at the local labor hall downtown for my father to meet one of their counselors in order to asses his skills and capabilities. When my father sat down with the fellow and asked all sorts of questions, his reply was a blank stare. Boris didn't understand a word. He did speak a little English | He knew two words, pipe and chair. So Boris did the smart thing. He kept saying pipe over and over. Whatever question, he simply replied... pipe. The counselor soon got the gist | Boris must be a plumber. He was handed a small slip of paper and was instructed to report to the address penciled on it at 6 am sharp the following day.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

We took our food order to go, in greasy paper bags, and walked across Columbus Circle to Central Park. He helped me up the giant prehistoric-looking rock just off the playground.

~ Camille Perri

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

~ Colson Whitehead

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

~ David Levien

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.

~ Beatriz Williams

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

~ Don Delillo

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

~ Colson Whitehead

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

~ Colson Whitehead