Sari Botton Quotes & Sayings

And then there are the subway readers of difficult books. I like to imagine that New Yorkers are more literate than the riders of other American metropolises. — Sari Botton

Kvetching means complaining, and complaining is really what will forever keep New York the city it is. — Sari Botton

Wherever I am is the beginning of an adventure. — Sari Botton

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast. — Sari Botton

People often mistake New Yorkers for rude and mean, but they're really just no-nonsense and efficient. They don't have time, regularly, to be warm and friendly with everyone who crosses their path. Nothing would ever get done. But when the chips are down, when it matters, they drop their cool exteriors and become unabashedly human. — Sari Botton

I know one of the secrets the rest of the country hasn't figured out yet: it's not New Yorkers who are rude, it's the tourists who've seen a movie about rude New Yorkers and think they have to act the same way when they come to New York who are rude. — Sari Botton

The subways, to my eyes, are a godsend: efficient, they get me where I want to go pretty quickly, they provide entertainment, sometimes via musicians who perform at station platforms, sometimes through the singing panhandlers who traipse through the cars, and most important, they are a stay against solipsism, proof positive that I am not alone in the universe. — Sari Botton

Leaving home does something to your sense of identity. Either you become more of that place than you ever were while you lived there, or your identity calcifies around the rejection of this place. It is challenging to inhabit the space between these two positions. — Sari Botton

Change is seen as something evil only by those who have lost their youth or sense of humor." That was Cookie Mueller on the East Village, 1985. The — Sari Botton

always that feeling when you walk out the door and onto the street in New York that today, no matter what happened yesterday, you can begin again. — Sari Botton

And I discovered this was the best thing about New York: you could run away every day if you wanted to and still find yourself in a newly incarnated version of the city. — Sari Botton

The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then - revealing - just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur - maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason. — Sari Botton