York Quotes

“I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it--a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you?”

“Though I have not lived in New York City for more than two decades, these storytellers – from the United States, Britain and Canada – have touched my heart with their openness, inspired me with their joie de vivre and deepened my appreciation for my hometown as a worldwide phenomenon. Welcome to our New York.”

“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.”

“You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.”

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

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

“New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something”

“People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.”

“It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

“New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.”