New Yorker Old Quotes & Sayings

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes. — Virginia Woolf

I see it for what is is, now. It is a house built on ashes. Ashes of the life Granddad shared with Gran, ashes of the maple from which the tire swing flew, ashes of the old Victorian house with the porch and the hammock. The new house is built on the grave of all the trophies and symbols of the family: the New Yorker cartoons, the taxidermy, the embroidered pillows, the family portraits. — E. Lockhart

New York lost a classic. Carmine was an old school New Yorker. — Anthony Weiner

In the past, I've been a bit diffident about my own albums, almost excusing them for some reason, even though deep down I felt strongly about them. — Jesse Harris

Three months later - a Jewish girl having in the meantime explained the fundamentals of kosher dining - he returned to the B & H Dairy Bar, and when, finally, the old man asked him if he'd ever been in a restaurant, Jeff answered, "I don't know - you ever worked in one?" After that he was a New Yorker. Cruising — Jay McInerney

So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized. — John Stuart Mill

Toward nightfall, Khrenov's temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive - the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking his head. Then he fell asleep. Natasha undressed by a candle's wan flame, and saw her reflection in the murky glass of the window - her pale, thin neck, the dark braid that had fallen across her clavicle. She stood like that, in motionless languor, and suddenly it seemed to her that the room, together with the couch, the table littered with cigarette stubs, the bed on which, with open mouth, a sharp-nosed, sweaty old man slept restlessly - all this started to move, and was now floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night. — Vladimir Nabokov

I will be the first. As of tonight, I renounce my citizenship in the United Nations, and my allegiance to the Shelter state. From now on I will be a citizen--a citizen of no country but that bounded by the limits of my own mind. I do not know what those limits are, and I may never find out, but I shall devote my life to searching for them, in whatever manner seems good to me, and in no other manner whatsoever.
You must do the same. Tear up your registration cards. If you are asked your serial number, tell them you never had one. Never fill in another form. Stay above ground when the siren sounds. Stake out plots; grow crops; abandon the corridors. Do not commit any violence; simply refuse to obey. Nobody has the. right to compel you, as non-citizens. Passivity is the key. Renounce, resist, deny! — James Blish

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind. — David Lodge

As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing. — Abel Ferrara

His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. — Carson McCullers

For most visitors to Manhattan, both foreign and domestic, New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. "I don't see how you stand it," they often say to the native New Yorker who has been sitting up past his bedtime for a week in an attempt to tire his guest out. "It's all right for a week or so, but give me the little old home town when it comes to living." And, under his breath, the New Yorker endorses the transfer and wonders himself how he stands it. — Robert Benchley

Maturity gives the best understanding of our human head and heart. Every decision we take seems less important after the results of the action. — Bhavik Sarkhedi

I'm so sorry," Gabby whispered. "Don't be, baby. This was way better than what I had planned anyway." He moved a stray curl back behind her ear, "I was so upset last night and knew I just needed some time to think, to make sure that this was the right decision." He leaned down and kissed her head. — J.B. McGee

One feels relieved these days when a play is not like television. — Valerie Martin

I am not a 'yes' person. No matter who you are married to, you still need to lead your life. — Melania Trump

The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added power now. As a kid, the psalmist (or psalmists) had seemed remote to me, the Psalms long prayers which sometimes rose to great poetry but often had simply to be endured. For a middle-aged man, the psalmists' moods and feelings came alive. One of the voices sounded a lot like a modern New Yorker, me or people I knew: a manic-depressive type A personality sometimes up, more often down, sometimes resigned, more often pissed off, railing about his sneaky enemies and feckless friends, always bitching to the Lord about the rotten hand he'd been dealt. That good old changelessness. — Tony Hendra

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker. — Bharati Mukherjee

When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there. (Mr Hunter's Grave, 1956) — Joseph Mitchell

What sets the new synthetic insecticides is their enormous biological potency. — Rachel Carson

Pray for the peace of the world. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In comics, the writer is also the director in a certain way. So if this were a film, you wouldn't tell the cinematographer to make a good fight scene while you go and get a cup of coffee. — Max Bemis

Unhealthy to the point of diseased, he'd say - he had caught something from her, some decay transmitted from soul to soul, but then he recollected contemptuously that by her own admittance she lacked a soul. At the intersection ahead they could see — Bob Shacochis