New York Quotes - Page 4

• I remember how often some of us walked out of the darkness of the Lower East Side and into the brilliant sunlight of Washington Square.

  Harry Golden

  Squares, Darkness, East

  Harry Golden (1967). “The Best of Harry Golden”, Cleveland : World Publishing Company

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• It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own).

  Henry James

  Paris, Growing, Way

  Henry James, Leon Edel (1987). “Henry James, Selected Letters”, p.184, Harvard University Press

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• Brooklyn Heights itself is a window on the port. Here, where the perspective is fixed by the towers of Manhattan and the hills of New Jersey and Staten Island, the channels running between seem fingers of the world ocean. Here one can easily embrace the suggestion, which Whitman felt so easily, that the whole American world opens out from here, north and west.

  Alfred Kazin

  Running, Ocean, Islands

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• And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you.

  Michael Bloomberg

  Dream, Believe, Matter

  Michael Bloomberg's Speech at the Republican National Convention in New York City, New York, www.washingtonpost.com. August 30, 2004.

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• And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

  Ezra Pound

  Beautiful, Stars, Cutting

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• New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

  Djuna Barnes

  Cities, Typical, Meetings

  1916 'Greenwich Village As It Is', in Pearson's Magazine, Oct.

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• I get out of the taxi and it's probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York.

  Milos Forman

  Reality, Cities, Looks

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• There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

  E. B. White

  Passion, Night, Men

  "In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers".

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• The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

  E. B. White

  Islands, Years, Bridges

  Here Is New York (1949)

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• The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Wise, Strong, Ignorant

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• In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Women, Memorable, Cities

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• The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

  Albert Einstein

  Cat, Long, Tails

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.474, Princeton University Press

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• This is New York, and there's no law against being annoying.

  William Kunstler

  Law, Annoyed, Annoying

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• A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions... Of all targets New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

  E. B. White

  Islands, Bridges, Priorities

  "Here Is New York". Book by E. B. White, 1948.

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• New York City is a great apartment hotel in which everyone lives and no one is at home.

  Glenway Wescott

  Home, Cities, Hotel

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• New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Toilets, London, Human Nature

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• I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.

  Albert Camus

  Real, Blow, Night

  Albert Camus (1987). “American journals”

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• It's a town you come to for a short time.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Towns, Short Time

  "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" by Lillian Ross, www.newyorker.com. May 13, 1950.

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• Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.

  Norman Mailer

  Believe, Eye, Fighting

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• The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Character, People, Grace

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• New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!

  E. B. White

  White, Church, Village

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.156, Cornell University Press

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• As rich as Cincinnati was in live music, New York was even more.

  Gunther Schuller

  Rich, Live Music

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• When we got off the streetcar at Times Square, it was somewhat of a letdown. Newspapers were blowing about the road and pavement, and Broadway looked seedy, like a slovenly woman just out of bed.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Funny, Humorous, Squares

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• In New York we have streets exploding and innocent Buddhist girls being stabbed in the neck and cabdrivers refusing to help her. If we happen into a nightclub by mistake, when we leave the doorman will be lying in the street surrounded by police.

  Cynthia Heimel

  Funny, Girl, Buddhist

  Cynthia Heimel (2002). “If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?!”, p.41, Grove Press

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• In Manhattan, marriage is a trend. Couples kiss over their arugula and radicchio salads. They fondle each other's genitals while devouring their pasta puttanesca. By the time the tiramisu arrives, they've slid under the table.

  Cynthia Heimel

  Funny, Couple, Humorous

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