New York City Quotes - Page 7

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.

It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.

I want to feel like I'm making a difference in this world. And I want some time for living rather than just working. Life is for living, isn't it? It can't be all just for working

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives

In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?

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.

If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish

In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.

Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.

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?

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.

...And on my fourth morning in Naples, I woke up alone. There was a note on the table with the breakfast that Cinzia had quietly prepared for me. It read, "It could never be. But that's why it will always be - perfectly divine. Cinzia" City Solipsism: A Short Story

Life is amazingly simplified,” she wrote in her journal, “now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow. In spite of reams of papers to be written, life has snitched a cocaine sniff of sun-worship and salt air, and all looks promising.” She already adored New York.

156/ I'd be very good at being rich, but no one has offered to test my talents in that department. ... New York was like a wealthy, handsome, intensely artistic, complex, slightly manic man who, for some inexplicable reason, was enthralled with me. Not that I ever met a man like that. Who needed men anyway? I'll take Manhattan.

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they'd likely just tell him Get over it . . . Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgement on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all?

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

This isn’t Soviet Russia. This is America we’re talking about. For God’s sake, this is New York City.

WHAT CAN YOU SPEND BUT YOU CAN NEVER GET BACK????TIME!CHOOSE HOW YOU SPEND YOUR TIME AND WHO YOU SPEND IT WITH WISELY.

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence.

Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.

But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn't feel any passion to write about the place. I didn't give a damn about local politics; I wasn't moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world was a centre and that centre was here. ‘The world's a sphere, everyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘The centre of a sphere doesn't lie on its surface. Look up the word 'superficial', when you have a chance.

New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.

It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Polonius, you sometimes have to get your hands a little dirty to set things straight.

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.

I wish I knew how to get you back. And apparently fate won't let me give up"From Central Park Song: a Screenplay

Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man back home is talking, you better listen closely.

If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation, you’re thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I’ve never been more bored by casual chat.

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

If “Been there, done that” isn’t your mantra,then make haste down your “bucket list.

Only criminals and madmen walk into Central Park after midnight...or, occasionally, an actor. (Dark City Lights)

I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.

New York, I thought, was a city defined by its flaws. In every possible way, its virtues were overwhelmed by its vices, as Jekyll was by Hyde. Yet it was these very vices that gave the city its character - like tar in an oak barrel lending its flavor to Scotch.

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

New York lesson 1 - never look lost. Lesson 2 - forget hallowed silences. It's the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

(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!

Fuck the Bureau! Their entire outfit is half the size of the NYPD. I've got more officers who speak Arabic in one precinct that you guys have in the entire D.O.D.!

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.

It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.

How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm?Why don't you stay sober today?We didn't come to New York to stay sober.

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

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

Slowly the sky turned from the color of cornflower to that of hyacinth, and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island appeared like a ring of diamonds against the twilight. New York-that city made of canyons between tall buildings, and ornate houses filled with glittering things that might trap a girl forever-was nothing more than a few dots on an infinite landscape. The atmosphere was crystalline and afforded her a perfect view. Only from this place was she able to see how limited the city was, after everything, and how wide open the world could all of a sudden become.

For all the energy directed toward the stratagem of big city living, New Yorkers are never too distracted to respond to, and more often, proactively assist visitors. Tourists tracing the routes of subway maps with their fingers, squinting at street signs or staring at a slip of paper with confusion are typical recipients of our generosity. We know our city can be as challenging as it is fascinating, and we want visitors to have a good experience.

When you look for beauty, you usually end up finding it.From Central Park Song (A Screenplay)

Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren't any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn't need one. (Dark City Lights)

Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper.

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

New York is a granite beehive, where people jostle and whir like molecules in an overheated jar. Houston is six suburbs in search of a center.

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.

But then, as I looked in the mirror, I became fixated on some hairs near my carotid artery that were still there. I pushed the blade deep against my neck to shave them off, and then blood squirted out.

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is.