Best 436 quotes in «new york city quotes» category

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    I visit you in my dreams and you talk to me in songs. Each sentence is a bridge taking me closer to the city that you are.

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    I waited in vain for someone like me to stand up and say that the only thing those of us who don't believe in god have to believe is in other people and that New York City is the best place there ever was for a godless person to practice her moral code. I think it has to do with the crowded sidewalks and subways. Walking to and from the hardware store requires the push and pull of selfishness and selflessness, taking turns between getting out of someone's way and them getting out of yours, waiting for a dog to move, helping a stroller up steps, protecting the eyes from runaway umbrellas. Walking in New York is a battle of the wills, a balance of aggression and kindness. I'm not saying it's always easy. The occasional "Watch where you're going, bitch" can, I admit, put a crimp in one's day. But I believe all that choreography has made me a better person. The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens, and I kept whispering under my breath "we the people, we the people" over and over again, reminding myself we're all in this together and they had as much right - exactly as much right - as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to.

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    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

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    I want to live New York City. Not live IN it, but live IT. I want to be alive right here, right now.

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    I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.

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    I was an I, an opera of feeling with a very small audience, a writer of articles about culture but with no real voice, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a dream of love growing ever more expansive because it was impossible, especially in the gay bars I sometimes frequented in Manhattan, where AIDS loved everyone up the wrong way, or in a way some people weren’t surprised by, particularly by those gay men who were too indifferent to be sad — in any case night sweats were a part of the conversation people weren’t having in those bars, in any case, taking your closest friend in because he was shunned by his family was part of the conversation people weren’t having, still, there was this to contend with: that friend’s shirt collars getting bigger, still, there was this to contend with: his coughing and wheezing in the little room off your bedroom in Brooklyn because TB was catching, your friends didn’t want you to catch it, loving a man was catching, your friends didn’t want you to get it; his skin was thin as onionskin, there was a lesion, he couldn’t control his shit, not to mention the grief in his eyes, you didn’t want to catch that; those blue eyes filled with why? Causing one’s sphincter to contract, your heart to look away, a child’s question you couldn’t answer, what happened to our plans, why was the future happening so fast? You didn’t want to catch that, nor the bitterness of the sufferer’s family after death, nor the friends competing for a bigger slice of the death pie after the sufferer’s death, you certainly didn’t want to catch what it left: night sweats, but in your head, and all day, the running to a pay phone to share a joke, but that number’s disconnected, your body forgets, or rushes toward the love you remember, but it’s too late, he’s closer to the earth now than you are, and you certainly don’t want to catch any of that.

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    I was walking along and I'm looking at the tall buildings. And I got to thinking about what Thoreau said: They created a lot of grand palaces here, but they forgot to create the noblemen to put in them.

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    Keep moving. Your next big thing may be just around the corner.

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    Like flowers blooming through cement, we, too, can grow beyond our cracks.

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    Like a driver who has lost control of his vechicle, I was bracing for the impending crash." From: "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

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    Look at it,' he said, gesturing. 'This window looks down upon hundreds more panes of glass, and behind those panes live thousands upon thousands of lost souls. When I feel cast down and helpless, scores of other men do as well, and when I am bitterly angry at feeling cast down and helpless, countless other people languish in concert with me. When I'm happy, it's the same. It's a bit like...I used to play chamber music. It's like a vast orchestra. And so I shan't ever be alone.

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    Manhattan is basically this island in New York, where all the cool stuff is located.

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    Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.

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    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.

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    Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.

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    Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.

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    My decision to become a teacher suddenly seemed even more appropriate. Life had just become that much more unpredictably precarious and ill-suited to long-term planning, and it felt that much more necessary to spread love and knowledge to those who would one day have to manage this messy and painful world of ours" Also in Zack Love's "Stories and Scripts: an Anthology

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    I wanted solitude, but a treasure like that didn't exist in the city. I only found silence in Central Park, still littered with people of course, but the only place that held moments of calm. I breathed in that wonderful silence as my pace finally slowed, and nature delighted my senses.

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    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 lives were playing out at my doorstep, and not one of them gave a damn about my little problems.

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

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    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.

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    Let the park live in you until it sings you a song.

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    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.

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

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

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    Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.

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    Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.

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

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    MY DEAREST MY EVER CRUSH I couldn’t have wished anything more Than that the spaces between my fingers Were filled with yours As I strolled and sample the best of NYC today I wish that every wish become real, and all dreams true Because in my dreams I am always with you Our friends both envy us and rejoice for us We are ever madly in love and think less of who cares I can’t wait to see you again True Love

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    My main concern while in New York wasn't becoming a hot shot. I was more concerned with staying alive, and that took all the pleasure out of the experience. I didn't know where to find a grocery store so I subsisted on hot dogs, peanuts and whatever else I could buy from a street vendor. I didn't know how to hail a cab (apparently there's an art to it). I stood on the edge of the sidewalk and waved my arms around but no one stopped, so I limited my entire universe to however far I could walk and I never walked too far because I was afraid I'd get lost and never find my way back home again. Perhaps that's why there are so many homeless people in New York; maybe they're not really lost, maybe some of them have homes but they just don't know how to get there.

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    My past still haunts me when I sleep, although I saw that - much to my surprise- his does as well.

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    Never mind gas masks and fallout shelters in the event of biological warfare. Many New Yorkers move from place to place equipped with the essentials of vermin assault weaponry: mouse traps, roach spray, and sticky tapes. In some neighborhoods, it’s a must.

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    New Yorkers and Texans get along so well. They have those same outsize personalities, that determination and passion, that “don’t mess with me” quality. And they have the same law my maternal grandmother would tell me from the time I was a little boy: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” Self-reliance, confidence. I really believe those lyrics, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” In Texas, we have something we call “the Cortez moment,” which refers to when the great Spanish explorer and conquistador of Mexico came and set up camp and then burned his boats. The phrase “burn the boats” means there’s nothing but forward, onward, no turning back or running home scared. It’s a motto for New York as much as for Texas. When you move here, if you’re any good at all, you burn the boats. (from My First New York)

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    New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.

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    New York is for people who need cities, for those who cannot function outside of one. Open and permissive, insulating you with the sort of anonymity you can't find in a small town or suburb, the city allows us to expand, experiment, and become our truest selves.

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    New insights from being present are a gift.

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    New York City is legendary for sleeping around. There's hot tail everywhere and it's such a big city that two-timing and even three-timing is very doable, if you plan it right." From "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever. (a Short Story)

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    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.

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    My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.

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    My new life was unstable and unsure, but each new day was shot through with new possibility.

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    Never tell your dreams to a person who has no vision.

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    [New York is] the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.

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    New York always feels more like my hometown than the places where I actually grew up (which weren't far from New York), perhaps because I did my artistic "growing up" while working in this crazy, wonderful city back in my twenties. Although I love the quieter, slower, nature-rich life I live now in the sheep-dotted hills of Devon, there are ways in which I still feel more truly myself here in New York, more than anywhere else. Even after all this time in the desert and on Dartmoor. Strange, isn't it?

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    New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.

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    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.

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    New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses.

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    New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.

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    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.

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    New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American

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    New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.

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