Nyc Quotes

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")”
― Ray Bradbury, Long After Midnight

“A killer must focus on details, Vanessa.”
― Steve Rush, Lethal Impulse

“One after another, deliberate actions focused on Neil. He identified no reason. For fifteen months, he lived in harmony with the church and the community. An assault on him and his character began the past Saturday evening. Someone painted his portrait in blood on the barn wall and contrived evidence to implicate him in the murders.”
― Steve Rush, Lethal Impulse

“Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.”
― Ann Douglas

“falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, creperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school. People's Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Ladi Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service corner.”
― Richard Price, Lush Life

“People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.”
― Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism

“Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.”
― Don Dellilo

“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban nights are like the night there.

I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers. They are immaterial; that is to say, one sees but the lighted windows. Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the Aether.

Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
― Ezra Pound

“I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.”
― Richard Price

“Money talks and bullshit walks in New York. In a lot of cities, probably—but here, the nation’s shrine to unrestricted predatory capitalism, money has nearly talismanic power. Which means that he can use it as a talisman.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.”
― Cat Agonis

“The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)”
― Tara Leigh Cobble, Crowded Skies: Letters To Manhattan

“She wanted to walk slowly and smell the wafting perfumes of bouquets that men had bought for their sweethearts and watch couples holding each other tight as they dashed along the pavement on their way to or from something that made them grateful to be in each other's company. Going home felt the same as going to sleep, and she was too bouncing, too overcome with bliss for that.”
― Anna Godbersen

“As they moved into the kick line for the big finale, her body tingled with anticipation and suddenly they were kicking in perfect tandem as the audience broke out into applause.”
― Fiona Davis, The Spectacular

“Unless you were high up in a building or happened to glimpse it at the end of one of the big avenues going east-west, all you knew of the sunset was a darkening in the air. No wonder people in New York were so unbalanced. They were totally untouched by the rhythms of nature. You were only aware of nature when something extreme happened, like a snowstorm or heatwave.”
― Susan Minot, Rapture

“…but because they felt the neighborhood was safer than the one around Columbia, the medical campus of which was so far north that it was practically an annex of the Bronx”
― Michelle Au, This Won't Hurt a Bit: (And Other White Lies): My Education in Medicine and Motherhood

“But they were New Yorkers, and the essence of the New York character is to mind your own business and let other people mind theirs.”
― Stephen King, Firestarter

“I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

“He said he had one of the worst pizzas in Chicago, and he wanted me to guess where it was from. I said, "New York?”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes

“It was the morning rush hour. The crowd was coming up the stairs of Penn Station like ants on the 7th Avenue side, and a Jehovah Witness was having a hell of a time selling religion.

— Christ Belongs To The Whole World.”
― Stephen Deck, Land of the Story Tellers: 24 Stories and 7 Poems

“French people fucking love Harlem for some reason.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“I remember when you first went to Manhattan and you wrote me and said ‘It’s wonderful but it’s not heaven.’ I thought of that when I took my first cab ride in Manhattan.”
― Adichie, Ngozi, Americanah: A Novel By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Conversation Starters

“You know I love you because
Weekend train service
Three avenues
1 to the 2 to the A
Dollar cab up Flatbush
Five floor walk-up

Forgive me for not breathing when I kiss you hello.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“She fastened her attention on the taxi window as they drove crosstown. It was one of those last wonderful days in October, when the air is balmy and the faded sun tries to pretend it's spring.”
― Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

“- Vad är det som skiljer oss åt? En ocean och två kontinenter eller åtta våningar?”
― Marc Levy

“The moon was a lightbulb dangling from a high ceiling, But in Brooklyn, there were no stars. Not in the sky. Miles, climbed along side his building up to the roof. Once there, he looked out at the New York City skyline and imagined that all the stars that were supposed to be there had fallen, and now sparkled much closer to the ground.”
― Jason Reynolds, Miles Morales Suspended

“Nobody in the Village has a job; everyone has a calling.”
― Jonathan Adler, Greenwich Village Stories: A Collection of Memories

“This city eats pretty boys like us alive if we let it.”
― Rob Costello, An Ugly World for Beautiful Boys

“This evening Maxine finds herself abroad in this pageant of classic NYC behavior, having made the mistake of offering to spring for a turkey if Elaine will cook it, and compounded it by putting in an advance order at Crumirazzi, a gourmet shop down toward 72nd. She gets there after supper to find the place jammed tighter than a peak-period subway with anxious citizens gathering supplies for their Thanksgiving feasts, and the turkey line folded on itself eight or ten times and moving very, very slowly. People are already screaming at each other, and civility, like everything on the shelves, is in short supply.

A serial line jumper has been making his way forward along the turkey line, a large white alpha male whose social skills, if any, are still in beta, intimidating people one by one out of his way.

"Excuse me?" Shoving ahead of an elderly lady waiting in line just behind Maxine.

"Line jumper here," the lady yells, unslinging her shoulder bag and preparing to deploy it.

"You must be from out of town," Maxine addressing the offender, "here in New York, see, the way you're acting? It's considered a felony."

"I'm in a hurry, bitch, so back off, unless you want to settle this outside?"

"Aw. After all your hard work getting this far? Tell you what, you go out and wait for me, OK? I won't be too long, I promise."

Shifting to indignation, "I have a houseful of children to feed—" but he's interrupted by a voice someplace over by the loading dock hollering, "Hey asshole!" and here cannonballing over the heads of the crowd comes a frozen turkey, hits the bothersome yup square in the head, knocking him flat and bouncing off his head into the hands of Maxine, who stands blinking at it like Bette Davis at some baby with whom she must unexpectedly share the frame. She hands the object to the lady behind her. "This is yours, I guess."

"What, after it touched him? thanks anyway."

"I'll take it," sez the guy behind her.

As the line creeps forward, everybody makes sure to step on, not over, the fallen line jumper.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge