Sunday, January 17, 2016 – New York Values
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question. ~ Dylan Thomas
Give me such shows – give me the streets of Manhattan! ~ Walt Whitman
One belongs to New York instantly; one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. ~ Tom Wolfe
I love New York City. The reason I live in New York City is because it’s the loudest city on the planet Earth. It’s so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that’s going on in my own head. It’s really loud. They literally have guys come with jackhammers and they drill the streets and just leave cones in front of your apartment; you don’t even know why. Garbage men come; they don’t pick up the garbage, they just bang the cans together. ~ Lewis Black
I remember walking across Sixty-Second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later – because I did not belong there, did not come from there – but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. ~ Joan Didion
Make your mark in New York and you are a made man. ~ Mark Twain
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. ~ James Baldwin
New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty! ~ Salvador Dalí
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 ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. ~ Ezra Pound
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. ~ Simone Beauvoir
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. ~ Le Corbusier
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life. ~ Irving Berlin
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. ~ Fran Lebowitz
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. ~ John Updike
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water. ~ Truman Capote
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire. ~ Henry James
If you live in New York, even if you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish. ~ Lenny Bruce
When it’s 100 degrees in New York it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When it’s 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles. ~ Neil Simon
When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it. ~ Hugh Newell Jacobsen
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. ~ Samuel Johnson
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. ~ Peter Shaffer
If, in New York, you arrive late for an appointment, say, “I took a taxi.” ~ Andre Maurois
A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards – or a field of gelded bulls – whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise. ~ Mark Halperin
The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags. ~ Henry Miller
New York now leads the world’s great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn’t make a sudden move. ~ David Letterman
New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city. ~ Lewis Mumford
Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There are shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That’s why I pay no mind. ~ Beck Hansen
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland. ~ Christopher Morley
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Siren South is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss – a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye. ~ E. B. White
If you’re not in New York, you’re camping out. ~ Thomas E. Dewey
There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect’s wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. ~ Chief Seattle
New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it. ~ Neil Simon
Cities are the abyss of the human species. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch. ~ Christopher Fieldes
I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey). ~ Bill Kraus
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. ~ Cyril Connolly
We do not look in our great cities for our best morality. ~ Jane Austen
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism. ~ Jean Baudrillard
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest. ~ Walter Benjamin
The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there. ~ Oscar Wilde
How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. ~ Toni Morrison, Jazz
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris. ~ Orville Wright
I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be. ~ David Bowie
New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment… a place where you’re least likely to be bitten by a wild goat. ~ Brendan Behan
In New York, you’ve got Donald Trump, Woody Allen, a crack addict and a regular Joe, and they’re all on the same subway car. ~ Ethan Hawke
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does. ~ Groucho Marx
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing. ~ Willa Cather
Just Above Sunset 