Quotes & Sayings About Old New York

OLD GRIZZLY ADAMS. [37-*] James C. Adams, or "Grizzly Adams," as he was generally termed, from the fact of his having captured so many grizzly bears, and encountered such fearful perils by his unexampled daring, was an extraordinary character. For many years a hunter and trapper in the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains, he acquired a recklessness which, added to his natural invincible courage, rendered him truly one of the most striking men of the age. He was emphatically what the English call a man of "pluck." In 1860, he arrived in New York with his famous collection of California animals, captured by himself, consisting of twenty or thirty immense grizzly bears, at the head of which stood "Old Sampson" - now in the American Museum - wolves, half a dozen other species of bear, California lions, tigers, buffalo, elk, etc., and Old Neptune, the great sea-lion, from the Pacific. — P.T. Barnum

Being a military child, we moved a lot and we developed different vernaculars from moving from the south, to the Midwest, and seeing the world. Going from New York to California and from Jamaica Queens to the South, I was always the new kid, or had the army crew haircut. I expected people to pick up on me. My brother kinda stole all of my old jokes. He got his inspiration from me. — Joe Torry

I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

I did not see anything [New York 1886] to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus [white man] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. This could not be better than the old ways of my people. — Black Elk

I live in New York, but I am always delighted to come to Europe because I am European and grew up here until I was 20. I am not only Italian, I am partly Swedish. When my parents divorced, I was three years old and went to live in Paris ... when I am offered a film in Europe, I come with great enthusiasm! — Isabella Rossellini

Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed.
Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have. — George Alec Effinger

She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them. That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a table staring at red paper napkins for wasn't real pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it. London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? — Douglas Adams

A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so - whatever the last year was for the New York World's Fair. — Kurt Vonnegut

On the bus was an old lady from Boston, and when she learned what I was going to do, she was horrified and indignant about me going out into that awful wilderness alone ... I tried to explain to her that I would be far more afraid to wander around Boston or New York alone than to hike over Trail Ridge. — Jacob Clifford Moomaw

New York has made me so paranoid, too. Whenever I visit another city, I always act like I'm from there, so the cab driver doesn't rip me off. I'm always like, "Yeah, it's good to be back home. Back here where I grew up. Yeah. Here in Tokyo ... Uh, driver, I need to go to my old stomping grounds. That would be the Holiday Inn. And the address appears to be the pound sign." — Jim Gaffigan

The Westway, the old strip club on Clarkson Street, is still there, but today it's owned by a hipster restaurant entrepreneur who caters to the ironic cultural lifestylers, more fashion world than art, people who are "cool" because they live in New York. — Kim Gordon

It's just some instinct as old as fear: you seek the dark when you hide, you seek the light when the need to hide is gone. All the animals have it too.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

I grew up in New York, in the Village, and I started going to Stella Adler pretty young. I was 13 or 14 years old. But I was also really shy when I was growing up. — Steven Strait

Essentially, the [New York] Philharmonic is just like any other orchestra-they all have the spirit of kids, and if you scratch away a little of the fatigue and cynicism, out comes a 17-year-old music student again, full of wonder, exuberance and a tremendous love of music. — Zubin Mehta

nearby New York or distant Beijing, but whenever I was in town, I'd call to say I was on my way. Each time I'd arrive, she'd already have covered half the dining room table with the kind of items I only seemed to consume with her. They were a reflection of her more traditional fare from the old world - hard-boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, herring in brine, black bread and cream cheese. We'd supplement this with ethnic staples — Leon Berger

You know how they say Black Flag got in a van, and they brought punk rock to the world? The Strokes got on a bus, and they brought "downtown cool" to the world. Along with the Internet, they were changing everything, not just music. They were changing attitudes. The Strokes were making New York travel with them. I saw kids in Connecticut and Maine and Philadelphia and DC looking like they had just been drinking on Avenue A all night. Sixteen-year-old kids in white belts and Converse Chuck Taylors with the greasy hair - hair that had been clean a week ago. Those kids had probably never even smelled the inside of a thrift store before Is This It came out. They found a band that they wanted to be like. They found their band. APRIL — Lizzy Goodman

Swords were brought out, guns oiled and made ready, and everything was in a bustle when the old Lexington dropped her anchor on January 26, 1847, in Monterey Bay, after a voyage of one hundred and ninety-eight days from New York. Everything on shore looked bright and beautiful, the hills covered with grass and flowers, the live oaks so serene and homelike, and the low adobe houses, with red-tiled roofs and whitened walls, contrasted well with the dark pine trees behind, making a decidedly good impression upon us who had come so far to spy out the land. Nothing could be more peaceful in its looks than Monterey in January, 1847. — William T. Sherman

The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live. — Armistead Maupin

In my teens I was interested in photography. Then I decided that I should learn something about the world of commerce. And I came to America at age 17 to escape Europe. I went to NYU - nothing better than being 17 years old and coming to New York. — Nicolas Berggruen

My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward. — Martin Scorsese

'Five, Six, Seven, Nate!' opens on my 13-year-old protagonist packing up a duffel bag and bidding his Midwestern town goodbye, heading off to start rehearsals for his New York City debut in 'E.T.: The Musical.' — Tim Federle

The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb. It gives a slap to the laundry stretched on lines between tenements, over dirty, broken streets where, even at this hour, hungry children scour the bins for food. The wind has existed forever. It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed. It has played mute witness to its burning witches, and has walked along a Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their human cargo, blinking and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose. — Libba Bray

I like the fact that New York looks a bit backwards, toward the Old World, rather than resolutely forwards. — Carter Burwell

The first year I was in New York, I met Martha Graham. She said, 'Well, Mr. Wilson, what do you want to do in life?' I was 21 years old, and I said, 'I have no idea.' And she said, 'If you work long enough and hard enough, you'll find something.' — Robert Wilson

Eddie remembered the punchline of an old New York joke: "Pardon me, sir, can you tell me how to get to City Hall, or should I just go fuck myself? — Stephen King

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

Well,' I said, 'Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn't what you feel in New York - 'He was smiling. I stopped.
'What do you feel in New York?' he asked.
'Perhaps you feel,' I told him, 'all the time to come. There's such power there, everything is in such movement. You can't help wondering - I can't help wondering - what it will all be like -
many years from now. — James Baldwin

I'd heard "Rhapsody in Blue" a thousand times and it always amazed me. It was so humble and then so bombastic. It was beautiful, bright, and terrifying: old and new, European and American. At times it sounded like Debussy, at times it sounded like Stravinsky, and at times it sounded like the Lower East Side in 1910.
"Rhapsody in Blue" was a quintessentially New York work of art, but it was also about moving from east to west, from the old world to the new... — Moby

If you've ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you'll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women. — Anthony Bourdain

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. — Edith Wharton

Police: NY bus driver drove drunk with 35 students on board CORTLANDT, N.Y. (AP) - Police say a school bus driver was driving drunk with 35 students on board when she sideswiped a utility pole in suburban New York. It happened Monday as 56-year-old Mary Coletti was taking students to Walter Panas High School in Cortdandt. Authorities say she sideswiped the pole around 7 a.m. They say her blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit of .08 percent. A few students suffered minor injuries. Lakeland School District Superintendent George Stone tells The Journal News Coletti's bus driver's license has been revoked. Coletti was arraigned Monday and sent to jail on $1,000 bail. She's due back in court May 18. It's unclear if she has an attorney. Posted: — Anonymous

Too much - too tempting - to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow. — Donna Tartt

When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old ("so they will tell me how young I look"), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did ("so they'll give us seats in the front row"). — Gloria Steinem

He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician. — Tom Hayden

The idea of the book [Japanes Lover] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing. — Isabel Allende

I've driven all through America and I know there are a lot of clever people between the coasts. But they have a slightly old-fashioned view of the world. Whereas New York is one of the most multicultural, multiracial, tolerant places on Earth. — Robbie Coltraine

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland. — Alan Hovhaness

Perseus Jackson, I do expect you to
refrain from causing any more trouble. "
"Trouble?" I demanded.
Dionysus snapped his fingers. A newspaper appeared on the table-the front page of today's
New York Post, There was my yearbook picture from Meriwether Prep. It was hard for me to
make out the headline, but I had a pretty good guess what it said. Something like: ... Perseus Jackson, I do expect you to
refrain from causing any more trouble. "
"Trouble?" I demanded.
Dionysus snapped his fingers. A newspaper appeared on the table-the front page of today's
New York Post, There was my yearbook picture from Meriwether Prep. It was hard for me to
make out the headline, but I had a pretty good guess what it said. Something like: Thirteen-
Year-Old Lunatic Torches Gymnasium. — Rick Riordan

The old man's fave gleamed, memory-bound. Eddie did not glimpse the young man who had been (Gran-pere was too old for that), but in his rheumy eyes he saw the mixture of excitement and determination and sick fear which must have filled him that day. Must have filled them all. Eddie felt himself reaching out for it the way a hungry man will reach for food, and the old man must have seen some of this on his face, for he seemed to swell and gain vigor. Certainly this wasn't a reaction the old man had ever gotten from his grandson; Tian did not lack for bravery, say thankya, but he was a sodbuster for all that. This man, however, this Eddie of New York... he might live a short life and die with his face in the dirt, but he was no sodbuster. — Stephen King

It was during my first trip to America in 1953 - that's when I learned to visit museums. I was then 26 years old. When I travel, the first thing I do is to visit museums. When I go to New York City, I usually go to Broadway to see the shows. — John Gokongwei

Medicaid is a vital safety net for New York's poor and vulnerable, young and old alike. — James T. Walsh

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin. — Edward Abbey

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

I'm going to show you the real New York - witty, smart, and international - like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you're trying to copy America, you're almost American. But here you'll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago - and we haven't spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world's in New York ... — Oriana Fallaci

Everyone experiences grace, even if they don't realize it.
It's kind of like Moby's music. You could ask your average sixty-something-year-old retired banker in Connecticut if he's ever heard of Moby and/or his music and the response you'd receive more than likely would be a resounding, "No - what's a Moby?"
But if you say, "Remember that American Express commercial where Tiger Woods is putting around New York City? Remember the song playing? That was Moby."
"Oh, then, OK. I guess I have heard Moby," our theoretical retired banker in New Canaan might say.
"So ... what exactly is a Moby?"
That's like grace. Not that grace is a pretentious vegan techno-rocker, but you get the idea.
Grace is everywhere, all around us, all of the time. We only need the ears to hear it and the eyes to see it. — Cathleen Falsani

One American newspaper wholesaler told The New York Times that the Indians basically replaced the old Jewish and Italian merchants and they've filled a tremendous void because nobody will put in the fourteen and sixteen-hour days that they do quite willingly and that you have to put in when running a newsstand. — Shashi Tharoor

My grandfather lived to be 96 years old. He was born in a town outside of Salerno in Southern Italy. He came to New York when he was 20. He lived in the States from age 20 to 96, but he brought his culture with him, he brought his food with him, he brought his language with him, he never spoke a word of English. — Abel Ferrara

The degree to which age was an issue in 1980 was illustrated by a pro-Bush scenario sketched out by James B. "Scotty" Reston of The New York Times: "George Bush's hope is that Messrs. Reagan and Connally will knock each other out because they're too old and that the party will have to turn in a convention deadlock to younger men. — Jon Meacham

That's the problem with being born in New York, the old newsman observed a little sadly. You've got no New York to run away to. — Amor Towles

At least Manhattan, in terms of danger and eccentricity, is much more of a theme park now. You couldn't really shoot the old Law & Order in New York today. It's a different city. — Chris Noth

Christina Baker Kline writes exquisitely about two unlikely friends - one, a 91-year-old survivor of the grinding poverty of rural Ireland, immigrant New York and the hardscrabble Midwest; and the other, a casualty of a string of foster homes - each struggling to transcend a past of isolation and hardship. Orphan Train will hold you in its grip as their fascinating tales unfold. — Cathy Marie Buchanan

I ordered another. If this was going to be a fish-story, I needed stimulants.
"On the liner going to New York I met a girl." Biffy made a sort of curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half. "Bertie, old man, I can't describe her. I simply can't describe her."
This was all to the good. — P.G. Wodehouse

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel. — Ernest Gaines

The thing about New York is, more than any other place I've ever been, you run into people on the street that you would never imagine you'd see, old friends, people just like there for a day or two. I find that all the time when I'm walking around Manhattan, running into people that I had no idea were even there. — Michael Shannon

When I was 28 years old, I found myself in Schenectady, New York, where I discovered that it was possible for some people to make a good living as physicists. — Ivar Giaever

If I had a magic wand, I would live in a building in New York, big enough so my friends, my family could all have apartments in it. We'd raise our kids in the same space and have backyard barbecues and get old and fat together. — Liz Murray

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?
[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)] — Ken Kesey

I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old. — Leonard Susskind

Yet the place was strangely old-fashioned. The strongest feeling I got from New York at first was nostalgia. A 1930s vision of the future. — Michael Moorcock

If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the State. — John Dos Passos

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor. — Rachel Kushner

Queens, New York. The most ethnically diverse region not just in the United States, but on the entire planet ... In Queens, you will find Korean kids who sound like black kids. Italians who sound like Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans who sound like Italians. Third-generation Irish who sound like old Jews. That's Queens. Not a melting pot, not even a tossed salad, but an all-you-can-eat, mix-and-match buffet. — Victor LaValle

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way. — Peter York

People think that they can love only when they find a worthy partner - nonsense! You will never find one. People think they will love only when they find a perfect man or a perfect woman. Nonsense! You will never find them, because perfect women and perfect men don't exist. And if they exist, they won't bother about your love. They will not be interested. I have heard about a man who remained a bachelor his whole life because he was in search of a perfect woman. When he was seventy, somebody asked, "You have been traveling and traveling - from New York to Kathmandu, from Kathmandu to Rome, from Rome to London you have been searching. Could you not find a perfect woman? Not even one?" The old man became very sad. He said, "Yes, once I did. One day, long ago, I came across a perfect woman." The inquirer said, "Then what happened? Why didn't you get married?" Sadly, the old man said, "What to do? She was looking for a perfect man. — Osho

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 yearning
To 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

When I was in New York, I got to see Joan Rivers do an hour of material, and it blew my mind. I don't remember how old she was at the time, but she just had this edgy hour that had so much funny stuff in it, and she was so fearless. If you only watch her on the red carpet, you don't get a sense of what a legendary standup comedian she is. — Chelsea Peretti

If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay. — Gayle Forman

Mr. Schmidt had screamed at me in New York: LOSER! You English Loser ... I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person - or a European - it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur. But not in the USA. Perhaps this is the great difference between the two worlds, this concept of Loserdom. In the New World it is the ultimate mark of shame - in the Old it prompts only a wry sympathy. — William Boyd

McGahern still lives on and works a farm in Leitrim, and friends say that even though he has held high profile academic posts round the world as a visiting professor he remains essentially a countryman.

Last term he taught in an upstate New York college, but seeing him in the soulless urban grid of downtown Syracuse wearing an old tweed flat cap and long black overcoat, he could have been in an Irish agricultural town on market day as he casually engaged strangers on the street to ask for advice on finding a decent restaurant. Friends say he has extraordinary confidence in who he is and where he's from - he behaves pretty much the same way wherever is and whoever he is with. — John McGahern

Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper. — Ellie Midwood

It's difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesn't matter if you're talking vampire movies or 'Dawn of the Dead' or 'The Thing' or 'Escape From New York.' Those kind of movies, they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be, they get the throwback of it. — Ethan Hawke

Living in New York after 14 years, I'm such an outdoors kind of person. I love gardening and building things. I like restoring old furniture. — Paige Butcher

The next day I was driven down to New York City to take the physical. It was one of the strangest things I'd ever seen. Several hundred young men, maybe even a thousand, in their skivvies, walking around an enormous room, all of us lost, dazed, and confused.
Some of these guys had dodged the draft and were there under the watchful eyes of dozens of federal marshals lined up against one of the walls. After eight hours of being poked, prodded, stuck, and poked again, I was given a large red envelope. I had been rejected. I had the respiratory problems of an old man, high blood pressure, partial loss of hearing, very bad teeth, very flat, very wide feet and I tested positive for tuberculosis.
"Frankly," the doctor said, "I don't know how the hell you're even standing up," and that was when the sergeant told me that if they bottled everything that was wrong with me "we could take over the world without a shot. — John William Tuohy

I live in New York City, and one day many years ago I was with a poet, Gregory Corso, walking through Greenwich Village. He pointed to a doorway in an alley that he said led to a tunnel under Manhattan, a tunnel he'd use to run from the cops. I started learning about old Prohibition-era speakeasy tunnels under the city, for running whiskey. — Ann Nocenti

New York was the glamorous town that you only see now in old movies and on Broadway stages. The sky was lit up with dancing neon signs. It was safe to walk out in the streets. — Art Buchwald

I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain's old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world. — Pankaj Mishra

In every big-budget science fiction movie there's the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it's gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn't have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn't going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput ...
VROOOOSH.
But it was exactly like that anyway. — Neil Gaiman

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

I like the 'Science Channel,' the 'Discovery Channel,' I like 'Discovery Times,' which is a fabulous hybrid of the 'New York Times' and 'Discovery Channel.' Maybe I'm just an old man, but I like to watch that stuff. — James Marsters

By noon, in a gray February world, we had come down through snow flurries to land at Albany, and had taken off again. When the snow ended the sky was a luminous gray. I looked down at the winter calligraphy of upstate New York, white fields marked off by the black woodlots, an etching without color, superbly restful in contrast to the smoky, guttering, grinding stink of the airplane clattering across the sky like an old commuter bus. — John D. MacDonald

We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America ... — Sarah Vowell

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

I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern accent. — Nikki DeLoach

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, 'It's all in Plato' - meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000] — Philip Pullman

He was like some prophet of old, scourging the sins of the people. He leaped about in a frenzy of inspiration till I feared he would do himself an injury. Sometimes he expressed himself in a somewhat odd manner, but every word carried conviction. He showed me New York in its true colours. He showed me the vanity and wickedness of sitting in gilded haunts of vice, eating lobster when decent people should be in bed.
'He said that the tango and the fox-trot were devices of the devil to drag people down into the Bottomless Pit. He said that there was more sin in ten minutes with a negro banjo orchestra than in all the ancient revels of Nineveh and Babylon. And when he stood on one leg and pointed right at where I was sitting and shouted "This means you!" I could have sunk through the floor. — P.G. Wodehouse

During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity. — Sal Albanese

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio. — Steve Lacy

Since moving to New York, she had been gradually abandoning her old ideas about the nobility of suffering. — Tom Robbins

I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking. — Wynton Marsalis

It was the old New York way ... the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them. — Edith Wharton

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on. — Beatriz Williams

I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something. — Carl Hiaasen

There were a few nighttime pedestrians on the block, but they continued on their way, dutifully ignoring the zombie vomiting blood out of the back of my car. Good old New Yorkers. They really couldn't care less. — Nicholas Kaufmann

I get a little romantic about the old Empire State. Just looking at it makes me want to play some Frank Sinatra tunes and sway a little. I have a crush on a building. I'd been in there several times but never to work. I always knew there were offices in there but the face never penetrated, really. You don't work in the Empire State Building. You propose in the Empire State Building. You sneak a flask up there and raise a toast to the whole city of New York. — Maureen Johnson

Kerri and I met at theatre camp when were 16 years old, which is pretty lame. The rest of us met when we founded the State at New York University in 1988. Most of our adult lives have been spent bickering with these people. — Thomas Lennon

The closest most people have ever come to understanding what an investment banker does may have been on October 24, 1995, when they heard the outrageous special interest story of the day. The wire services released the story first. It was quickly picked up and parroted by almost every major media outlet in the country as a classic example of Wall Street excess. A fifty-eight-year-old frustrated managing director from Trust Company of the West, on an airplane trip from Buenos Aires to New York City, downed an excessive number of cocktails, got out of his seat in the first-class cabin of a United Airlines flight, dropped his pants, and took a crap
on the service cart. There you have it. That's what bankers do: consume, process, and disseminate. — Peter Troob

I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I'm regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfortable. — Tony Judt

I had a teacher, he was 86 years old and his name was Luigi in New York City, and he said, 'Never stop moving. You get to reinvent yourself.' So you have to find ways to reinventing yourself. Especially today, because it's a whole different market - social media is so important. — Ben Vereen

In theory, sure, Gregor could still go home. Pack up his three-year-old sister, Boots, get his mom out of the hospital, where she was recovering from the plague, and have his bat, Ares, fly them back up to the laudry room of their appartment building in New York City. Ares, his bond, who saved his life numerous times and who had had nothing but suffering since he had met Gregor. He tried to imagine the parting. "Well, Ares, it's been great. I'm heading home now. I know by leaving I'm completely dooming to annihilation everbody who's helped me down here, but I'm really not up for this whole war thing anymore. So, fly you high, you know?" Like that would ever happen. — Suzanne Collins

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions. — Colson Whitehead