New York City Quotes
Most popular New York City quotes
A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.
The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
Mammon, n. The god of the world's leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.
New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across the hundreds of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
This island, floating in river water like a diamond iceberg.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.
In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
New York City isn't a melting pot, it's a boiling pot.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that had ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York.
New York is an arrogant city; it has always wanted to be all things to all people, and a surprising amount of the time it has succeeded.
The Super-City, where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.
Perhaps the unforgivable sin of this troubled city, to outsiders, is its refusal to take itself too seriously. New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
A city that is as heartbreaking in its beauty as it is in its poverty and decay. It is still a city of dreams—promised, built, and broken.
New York is the city where the future comes to rehearse.
New York is the true City of Light in any season.
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.
Not only is New York the nation's melting pot, it is also the casserole, the chafing dish, and the charcoal grill.
New York was heaven to me. And Harlem was Seventh Heaven.
All people talk of money sometimes, everywhere. But not for all people, everywhere, is money the addiction, the obsession, the stimulant, that it seems to be in New York.
It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
In a pure anonymous encounter you find a world alive and full of character. In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in people's faces. You hear the songs immediately.
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.
In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York, they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.
While Paris gets to your heart, London to your mind, and Jerusalem to your soul, New York gets into your veins, a lifeline that becomes part of you more than you become part of it.
Situated on an island, which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice, from the sea, and like the fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.
Noisy, mighty, dirty, nasty, proud, and preening. Capital of the American Century, a metropolis unbound. Brutish, sophisticated, demanding, scornful, a sticky-hot melting pot boiling over.
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!
In old age, lame and sick...I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken—the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords.
One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening.
