227 quotes found
“No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked.”
“My new life was unstable and unsure, but each new day was shot through with new possibility.”
“New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.”
“I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.”
“And yet, there will always be something essentially elsewhere about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn't ever fully offer itself. It's intoxicating. Keeps you on...”
“I said, "It really didn't feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?”
“Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one...”
“In New York, everything was permissible. No one cared what you wore, how you looked. Only you cared about those things. And if they didnt worry you, then they didnt matter.”
“The warm humid air of New York clung to the night, unwilling to relinquish its suffocating hold. And yet to Eva, the city had an underlying hum of possibility; a constant forward motion that promis...”
“Another funny thing about living in this city is how easy it can be to lose track of people. We're all so busy, always rushing around, so wrapped up in our own stuff. It stops occurring to us to ch...”
“You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”
“Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant p...”
“Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.”
“New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.”
“I wanted the rattle of New York around me, I wanted stink and strangers and the sour dank air of the IRT clutching me to its bosom. I wanted hustle and bustle. I wanted to know that millions of liv...”
“New York is such an awful place. No wonder it's so crowded. No wonder it's almost impossible to leave.”
“Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.”
“I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.”
“The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.”
“As if these daily humiliations and sacrifices mean something, are tallied by the ones who keep the books. Tomorrow we pick up where we left off. Sleep tight. Sleep deep. Sleep the sleep of the succ...”
