c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I propose a toast to mirth; be merry! Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and the digest. let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy. The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale is a gratuitous Elleviou.Summer, I salute thee!
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Summer flings always seemed amazing in movies, though that might be because the leading man did not ever call his romantic interest "dude.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Artificial Gods
So slip on your goggles and your reading trunks, for the sun is high. Let me leave you with one more thought. In what season of the year do we find ourselves - I'm speaking for a moment in terms of the physical world - wading through things? Surf. Kelp. Books. Summer.
— Roy Blount Jr., Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit & Passion
We never really know what might me beside us or ahead, but most days we walk as if we do
— Katherine Catmull, Summer and Bird
Thinking these things made space and time around her, the way saying 'only June' had when she was a child hoarding summer.
— Zibby Oneal, In Summer Light
Summer in Honolulu brings the sweet smell of mangoes, guava, and passionfruit, ripe for picking; it arbors the streets with the fiery red umbrellas of poincianta trees and decorates the sidewalks with the pink and white puffs of blossoming monkeypods. Cooling trade winds prevail all summer, bringing what the old Hawaiians called makani 'olu' 'olu--- "fair wind".
— Alan Brennert, Honolulu
I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
End of the SummerIt was end of the summerAnd my heart was brokenbut i was smiling, laughing, making jokesLike there was nothing bleeding insideAs always.
— Arzum Uzun
You are neither coffee nor tea,you are just the right amount ofwhatever it is I’m trying to find.
— Sade Andria Zabala
August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, / Against the wrackful siege of battering days?
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
I felt drunk on Chase and high on summertime. Why did that sound just like a country song?
— J.L. Weil, Saving Angel
It was a heavenly summer, the summer in which France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Leaves were never such an intense and iridescent green; sunlight glinted on flower-studded meadows as the Germans encircled the Maginot Line and overran not only France but Belgium and Holland. Birdsong filled the air in the lull between bursts of gunfire and accompanied the fleeing refugees who blocked the roads. It was as though the weather was preparing a glorious requiem for the death of Europe.
— Eva Ibbotson, A Song for Summer
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and veryfew employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that onyour own time.
— Charles J. Sykes
I feel the fluttering of dragonflies—summer creatures that have no use for words.
— Larissa Nash, Emerge Literary Journal
And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.
— Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
Would I ever find the perfect note to fill the music sheet that I had?
— Kristine Cuevas, Not a Melodious Harmony
However, although you might think this is the time of year to take some time off, you must never transgress one of the allotment rules: 'Thou shan't go on holiday in summer!
— Mitchell Beazley
Prove to me that you deserved it.
— Kristine Cuevas
The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
August in Mississippi is different from July. As to heat, it is not a question of degree but of kind. July heat is furious, but in August the heat has killed even itself and lies dead over us.
— Elizabeth Spencer, Fire in the Morning
The days draw out, the weather gets warmer, and it's what we call summer, with a bitter laugh when we've said it.
— Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving
Though it was mid-July, the morning was brisk, the sky a gray cotton of clouds, and Puget Sound a steely, cold blue. Most of Seattle grumbled, worn with winterish weather, impatient for the elusive summer sun. With umbrellas tucked away in the trunks of cars, sunglasses lost and separated from their original purchasers, the Pacific Northwest was a bastion of misty air and pale, complaining residents.
— Courtney Kirchoff, Jaden Baker
For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not merely passengers of history, but pilots as well.
— Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer
Summer has weeks left, but once the calendar displays the word “September,” you’d think it was Latin for “evacuate.” I pity them for missing the best weather and the most energized time of year…It’s an extremely impressive display of life at the apogee of summer, the year’s productivity mounded and piled past the angle of repose. It is a world lush with the living, a world that-despite the problems- still has what it takes to really produce.
— Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
— Sylvia Plath
Underneath my lashes I watched him, and I thought,Come back. Be the you I love and remember
— Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You
I do love the beginning of the summer hols,' said Julian. They always seem to stretch out ahead for ages and ages.''They go so nice and slowly at first,' said Anne, his little sister. 'Then they start to gallop.
— Enid Blyton, Five Go Off in a Caravan
Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
— Hal Borland
There have been other girls. But they weren't her.
— Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You
The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.
— James     Baldwin
Or maybe watching you enjoy a carefree summer while you fell in love was what kept me out of the hospital in the first place.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
I love how summer just wraps it’s arms around you like a warm blanky.
— Kellie Elmore, Magic in the Backyard
But in summer, welcoming summer, the rocks are soft-fledged with moss. The forest floor is bouncy with fresh shoots and enthusiastic blooms; the twisted angles of the branches are laced by bud and leaf.
— Tara O'Brady
Early Summer, loveliest season,The world is being colored in.While daylight lasts on the horizon,Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing.The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos."Welcome, summer" is what he says.Winter's unimaginable.The wood's a wickerwork of boughs.Summer means the river's shallow,Thirsty horses nose the pools.Long heather spreads out on bog pillows.White bog cotton droops in bloom.Swallows swerve and flicker up.Music starts behind the mountain.There's moss and a lush growth underfoot.Spongy marshland glugs and stutters.Bog banks shine like ravens' wings.The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome.The speckled fish jumps; and the strongSwift warrior is up and running.A little, jumpy, chirpy fellowHits the highest note there is;The lark sings out his clear tidings.Summer, shimmer, perfect days.
— Marie Heaney, The Names Upon The Harp: Irish Myth And Legend
Watching the summer close is like watching a good kid die for no apparent reason.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
— Russell Baker
One of my favourite things about dining outdoors in a warmer season is that it frees hands and bares skin. ... When we don't need to wear or carry heavy clothing, our bodies feel lighter and our hands are freed for other things. Like carrying bottles of rosé; bags of stone fruit, fish, and clams; and a simple kettle and a tiny grill for a quiet, all-day beach excursion. Then we can eat well.
— Kirstin Jackson
Beacon, beacon, lonesome on a hill—Waves run aground, pound ‘round, what a thrill!Water water everywhere crashes,Shore’s not lazy for it mashes, bashes…..Summer’s when tourists traipse o’er to see you,Offering to wipe-wash your dust and mildew;Summer painters place you with dinghy and gull,Historians have you as subject o’er which to mull.When feline Fog drifts gently or is heavy,	Your bright light’s followed by boat bevy;And during those calm, clear days and nightsYou’re that upright nautical dream exciting tiny tykes.
— Mariecor Ruediger, HOT STUFF:  Celebrating Summer's Simmer and Sizzle
Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself. This results in a palpable, almost frenetic tension that hangs in the air just below the clouds. By dusk, spread thin across the quilt-work farmlands by disparate prairie winds, this formless energy creates an abscess in the fabric of space and time that most individuals rarely take notice of. But in the soulish chambers of particularly sensitive observers, it elicits a familiar recognition—a vague remembrance—of something both dark and beautiful. Some understand it simply as an undefined tranquility tinged with despair over the loss of something now forgotten. For others, it signifies something far more sinister, and is therefore something to be feared.
— P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
To her surprise, Jilly appeared to have handed over the telephone and a momentlater Taka ended the call. No, maybe it shouldn't surprise her. Jilly would have resisted bullying, but Taka's calm control was very…seductive.
— Anne Stuart, Ice Blue
She heard the zip of his pants, and expected him to step away from her, leave her alone in the bathroom to pull herself together. Instead, his hands were very gentle as he moved her out of the way, running water into the tiny sink.And then his hands were between her legs, and he was washing her, and she was too shocked to do anything more than let him. He tossed the paper towels, then took her discarded clothes from the floor and put them on her, waiting patiently as she lifted one foot, then the other. She was trembling, weak, totally compliant, and when he finished he wet another paper towel and washed her face with it, gently, like a lover.
— Anne Stuart, Ice Blue
I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.
— Rick Riordan
Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.
— Nora Ephron
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 the beauty in the world.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
— Truman Capote
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.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
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.
— Nora Ephron, Heartburn
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
— Tom Wolfe
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
— John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
People go to LA to "find themselves", they come to New York to become someone new.
— Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York
...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.
— Edward Rutherfurd, New York
New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.
— Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
— Fran Lebowitz
So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bluebeard
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
— Teju Cole, Open City
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.
— James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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.
— Maeve Brennan
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 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, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
— Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view.
— Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees
You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.
— Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.
— Jim Butcher, Grave Peril
He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.
— Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Tradition does not mean a dead town
—  it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.
— E.B. White
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
— Willa Cather
It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. They’d put a good face one it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friend making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
Skyscraper National Park
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.
— David B. Lentz, The Fine Art of Grace: A Novel
Guys like you can't escape the city. Hell, you a got a blood contract with this place. You're married to the old girl.
— Mickey Spillane, Kiss Her Goodbye: An Otto Penzler Book
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
I'm bound to say that New York's a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I'm a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.
— P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves
The safest day at the Melody is St. Paddy's," adds another Mardi Gras girl. "All the cops are out vomiting at the parade.
— Josh Alan Friedman, Tales of Times Square
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
— Simone de Beauvoir
I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.
— Jimmy Breslin
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
— Albert Camus
It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.
— O. Henry
Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.
— O. Henry
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
— Russell Baker
What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.
— Charles Whibley, American Sketches
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
— Elbert Hubbard
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.
— John Lennon
He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.
— Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.
— Truman Capote
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.
— Theodore Dreiser
Vulgar of manner, overfed,Overdressed and underbred;Heartless, Godless, hell's delight,Rude by day and lewd by night…Crazed with avarice, lust and rum,New York, thy name's delirium.
— Byron Rufus Newton
As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.
— Pearl S. Buck
It's a city where everbody mutinies but no one deserts.
— Harry Hershfield
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
— Henry James
People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.
— Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
— Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get outof here."She snorted. "Like hell.""I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.
— Jim Butcher, Grave Peril
The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.
— Philip Hone
people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.
— Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
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?
— Terri Windling
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.
— Le Corbusier
If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish
— Lenny Bruce
Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.
— Robert Benchley
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.
— E.B. White
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.
— Henry Ford
True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.
— Jimmy Breslin
I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City .
— Spalding Gray
You haven't lived until you died in New York.
— Alexander Woollcott
It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.
— O. Henry
If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.
— Arthur C. Clarke
Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?
— Walt Whitman
Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.
— Edward I. Koch
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
— Alistair Cooke
When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read
— G.K. Chesterton
The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.
— Frank Rich
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.
— Duke Ellington
Give my regards to Broadway,Remember me to Herald Square,Tell all the gang at 42nd Street,That I will soon be there;Whisper of how I'm yearningTo mingle with the old time throng,Give my regards to old Broadway,And say that I'll be there e'er long.
— George M. Cohan
And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.
— Willie Morris
The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas.
— Vincent Scully
New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.
— Ford Madox Ford
On a New York subway you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.
— Lewis Grizzard
No other place can so convincingly claim to be the capital of capitalism, the capital of the 20th century and the capital of the world.
— Kenneth T. Jackson
East Side, West Side, all around the town,The tots sang "Ring-a-rosie, London Bridge is falling Down;Boys and Girls together, me and Mamie O'Rorke, Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.
— James W. Blake
New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle;Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness….There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory inTheir skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.
— Christopher Morley
Is a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when The New York Times prints it, it's a sociological study.[Adolph S. Ochs - Publisher New York Times]
— Adolph S. Ochs
New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East
— John Gregory Dunne
There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.
— Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
If one is looking for cultural testosterone and raging off-the-wall competition in the world of communications, Manhattan was - and is - home plate.
— Brock Yates
The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.
— Edward I. Koch
In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?
— Mark Twain
Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough
— John Steinbeck
Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.
— Ann  Douglas
Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.
— Robert Moses
Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to the image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.
— Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
— Irving Berlin
It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.
— Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky
Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.
— Irwin Shaw
I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified.
— Anita Weiss
City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, 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.
— Leon Trotsky
New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say "These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.
— Robert Benchley
New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.
— Michael R. Bloomberg
New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
— Christopher Morley
I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.
— Richard Price
The city is the size of a country, but has been operated like a candy store.
— Edward I. Koch
My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad
—  but New York City?
I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
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.
— Henry James, Washington Square
The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history.
— Henry James, Washington Square
New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.
— Anna Quindlen
To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.
— Dallas Athent
The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation that five times the population of any other portion of the country.
— Malcolm Forbes
New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels. A person given to idleness, as Parvis has come to think of himself, must move about for the sake of moving, if only to fit into the general scheme of things - an electron obeying the current. Tantamount to movement, he has come to realize, is self-reliance, a fact reflected in the language: "Take care," a friend may say to another as the two part. In his old life the same two friends would have said to one another, khodahfez - "may God protect you.
— Dalia Sofer, The Septembers of Shiraz
When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 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
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City: Personal Essays 1920-40
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.
— James Hillman
On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.
— Edward Conlon, Blue Blood
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
— H.L. Mencken
That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.
— Andrew Vachss, Mask Market
The Bronx? No Thonx!
— Ogden Nash
New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up
— E.B. White
It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.
— Anna Godbersen
New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.
— Thomas Jefferson
New York is a sucked orange.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.
— H.G. Wells
Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.
— Marilyn Vos Savant
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.
— Saul Bellow
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway.
— Henry James, Washington Square
Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.
— O. Henry
New York is the place where everyone will stop a championship fight to look at an usher giving a drunk the bum's rush.
— Damon Runyon
My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.
— Henry Miller
Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.- Frances Trollope (1827)
— Frances Trollope
Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.
— Kenneth Tynan
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.
— Nigel Goslin
(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!
— Camilla Monk, Beating Ruby
No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked.
— Lisa Ko, The Leavers
My new life was unstable and unsure, but each new day was shot through with new possibility.
— Lisa Ko, The Leavers
If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.
— Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli
Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
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.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
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.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
The city was radiant and I felt untouchable.
— Stephanie Danler