New York City

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New York City is the largest city of the United States by population. It was settled in 1613 by Dutch and originally called New Amsterdam. New York City is popularly known as the "The Big Apple", "Gotham City", "Empire City", "Fun City", "The Naked City" and the "City That Never Sleeps". Manhattan Island is often referred to as just "The City". It is often referred to as "the Capital of the World".

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Contents

Quotes [edit]

  • The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
  • New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
  • I can't see heaven but I credit hell —
    I live in New York so I know it well.
    • John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968), the happening world (6): "Street Seen"
  • Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality.
    • Albert Camus Algerian-French author Albert Camus in "American Journals" (1978).
  • 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 the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
  • New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.
  • I used to love to call LA when I lived in New York. "What're y'all doin'? Talkin' to TV producers, huh? Bummer. Me? I'm readin' a book! Yeah, we're thinkin' back East! Yeah, we're evolving. Is that "The Big One" I hear in the background? Bye, you lizard scum, bye!
  • New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments,--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.
  • When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
  • New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.
  • New York: A third-rate Babylon.
  • That particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature- I've never received it from nature, only from. Buildings, Skyscrapers. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. 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 pest-hole 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 like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
  • Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spent in New York.
    • Harry Ruby, reported in Rand Lindsly's Quotations.
  • New York is a woman, holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand, and strangling the earth with the other.
    • Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said (pseudonym Adunis) in "The Funeral of New York".
  • When its 100 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. When its 10 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. There are two million interesting people in New York. There are 78 in Los Angeles.
  • New York is baffling in that it's a city that prides itself on being an absolute shithole. It's like — there's nothing good here, people are proud of that, they're happy, 'Oh, it's overpriced, and it's overpopulated, and it stinks like piss, and comics! — comics film specials here!' And they all open with a joke about, 'Yeah, you spend 8 thousand dollars a month for 9 square feet!' And you go, 'Well, why do you fucking live here?' Why do people stay here?.. But unfortunately, this is where comedy works — where people are the most miserable.
  • Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer.
  • City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
  • New York is symbolic for the pride of mankind.
    • Cevat Yerli, CEO and President and Crytek, on why Crysis 2 was set in New York City. [1].

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922) [edit]

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 552-53.

  • Stream of the living world
    Where dash the billows of strife!—
    One plunge in the mighty torrent
    Is a year of tamer life!
    City of glorious days,
    Of hope, and labour and mirth,
    With room and to spare, on thy splendid bays
    For the ships of all the earth!
  • Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that nothing of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take offence. We would call nobody a lobster with good and sufficient claws.
    • O. Henry, Between Rounds. In Four Million.
  • New York is the Caoutchouc City. * * * They have the furor rubberendi.
    • O. Henry, Comedy in Rubber. In The Voice of the City.
  • In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness.
    • O. Henry, Defeat of the City. In The Voice of the City.
  • Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in long, monotonous rows like, the basalt precipices hanging over desert cañons. Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this background were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the violet and purple depths ascended like the city's soul, sounds and odors and thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know. There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it came up to him and went into his blood.
    • O. Henry, The Duel. In Strictly Business.
  • Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me * * * Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West now to me.
    • O. Henry, The Duel. In Strictly Business.
  • "If you don't mind me asking," came the bell-like tones of the Golden Diana, "I'd like to know where you got that City Hall brogue. I did not know that Liberty was necessarily Irish." "If ye'd studied the history of art in its foreign complications, ye'd not need to ask," replied Mrs. Liberty, "If ye wasn't so light and giddy ye'd know that I was made by a Dago and presented to the American people on behalf of the French Government for the purpose of welcomin' Irish immigrants into the Dutch city of New York. 'Tis that I've been doing night and day since I was erected."
    • O. Henry, The Lady Higher Up. In Sixes and Sevens.
  • GEORGE WASHINGTON, with his right arm upraised, sits his iron horse at the lower corner of Union Square * * * Should the General raise his left hand as he has raised his right, it would point to a quarter of the city that forms a haven for the oppressed and suppressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national or personal freedom they have found refuge here, and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district, while he listens through his left ear to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity of his protégés.
    • O. Henry, A Philistine in Bohemia. In Voice of the City.
  • If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"—that's what they sing.
    • O. Henry, A Tempered Wind. In The Gentle Grafter.
  • You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are bailed hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?
    • O. Henry, A Tempered Wind. In The Gentle Grafter.
  • Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of exiles.
  • Some day this old Broadway shall climb to the skies,
    As a ribbon of cloud on a soul-wind shall rise,
    And we shall be lifted, rejoicing by night,
    Till we join with the planets who choir their delight.
    The signs in the streets and the signs in the skies
    Shall make a new Zodiac, guiding the wise,
    And Broadway make one with that marvelous stair
    That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer.
  • Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities float
    In sunset's golden and crimson dyes: I look and a great joy clutches my throat!
    Plateau of roofs by canyons crossed: windows by thousands fire-furled—
    O gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City in the World.
  • Just where the Treasury's marble front
    * Looks over Wall Street's mingled nations,—
    Where Jews and Gentiles most are wont
    * To throng for trade and last, quotations;
    Where, hour, by hour, the rates of gold
    * Outrival, in the ears of people,
    The quarter-chimes, serenely tolled
    From Trinity's undaunted steeple.


  • Lo! body and soul!—this land!
    Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and
    The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
    The varied and ample land,—the South
    And the North in the light—Ohio's shores, and flashing Missouri,
    And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn.
    • Walt Whitman, Sequel to Drum-Taps. When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd, Stanza 12.

Unsourced [edit]

  • New York remains what it has always been: a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring, it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.
  • If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself.
  • Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.
  • The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
  • People come up to me and say, 'you know, if you stopped smoking, you'd get your sense of smell back.' (pauses) I live in New York City, I don't want my sense of smell back. 'Is that urine? (sniffs) I think I smell a dead fella! Where's that coming fro— Look honey, a dead fella! I found him, thank God I quit smoking, I can find dead fellas in puddles of urine.' I love living in New York.

Songs [edit]

  • In New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh
    There's nothing you can't do, now you're in New York
    These streets will make you feel brand new
    Big lights will inspire you, let's hear it for New York
    New York, New York
  • 'Cause everyone's my friend in New York City
    And everything looks beautiful when you're young and pretty
    The streets are paved with diamonds and there's just so much to see
    But the best thing about New York City is you and me.
  • In New York freedom looks like too many choices
    In New York I found a friend to drown out the other voices
    Voices on the cell phone
    Voices from home
    Voices of the hard sell
    Voices down the stairwell
    In New York, just got a place in New York
    • U2, New York.
  • I had seven faces
    thought I knew which one to wear
    But I'm sick of spending these lonely nights
    training myself not to care
    the subway, she is a porno
    and the pavements they are a mess
    I know you've supported me for a long time
    somehow I'm not impressed
    New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)
  • Me, I'm takin' a Greyhound
    On the Hudson River line
    I'm in a New York State of Mind
  • It's easier to leave than to be left behind
    Leaving was never my proud
    Leaving New York, never easy
    I saw the light fading out
    You find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart
    You find it in your heart, change...
  • Why do we still live here
    In this repulsive town?
    All our friends are in New York

References [edit]

  1. ↑ Baron, Joseph L., ed (1956). A Treasury of Jewish Quotations. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.. p. 332. 
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