Yorker Life Quotes & Sayings

Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade. — Stephanie Clifford

Who can endure a Cabbage Bed in October? - 'Sanditon — Jane Austen

It's our decisions, not our conditions, that ultimately shape the quality of our lives. — Derric Yuh Ndim

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

The purpose of life is to glorify God in both good and hard times alike. — T. B. Joshua

I lived in New York my whole life. Like every New Yorker, I have stories about spending summers on the Jersey shore, riding the roller coaster in Seaside that is now famous for that sickening photo of it being washed out to sea. — Marissa Jaret Winokur

Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life. — Daniel Alarcon

Dillinger is an epicure, serenely removed from such soft and bourgeois considerations as loyalty and disloyalty, and her only anxiety in life is to better herself aesthetically. — The New Yorker

Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations. — Edward Sapir

Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, Humour studies would that be, sir? — Keith Waterhouse

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing. — D.H. Lawrence

Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one. — Philip Zaleski

There isn't going to be any turning point ... There isn't going to be any next-month-it'll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don't have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say, "So this is it. This is really all there is to it. This little thing." Everybody needing such little things and they can't get them. Everybody needing just a little ... confidence from somebody else and they can't get it. Everybody, everybody fighting to protect their little feelings. Everybody, you know, like reaching out tentatively but drawing back. It's so shallow and seems so ... fucking ... it seems like such a shame. It's so close to being like really right and good and open and amorphous and giving and everything. But it's not. And it ain't gonna be.
September 1969
quoted in "The New Yorker" 9 August 1999 — Janis Joplin

I live a very quiet life, although I'm very urban and a diehard New Yorker. — Armand Assante

I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.' — Paul Engle

It's usually when the cameras leave that the support leaves as well. — Petra Nemcova

I would absolutely identify as a New Yorker by nature. I grew up in Detroit. There was not a bone in my body that even considered staying in Detroit for the rest of my life. — Kristen Bell

I went to UCF in Florida in Orlando. I went for advertising and public relations. I moved out to California my senior year because I knew I wanted to be an actor, but I also wanted to finish school and get my degree. I took mainly a bunch of criminal justice courses online for the last year because that's all that they offered. — Drew Seeley

Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak. — Elizabeth Gilbert

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:
...Beneath the sky
Of my America to sigh
For one locality in Russia.

(a passage not for 'general readers' but for 'idiots') — Vladimir Nabokov

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

We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life. And it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001. — Michael Bloomberg

I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people. — Jamaica Kincaid

Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine. — Sally Mann

This is a magazine-reading country. When one comes back from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like The Atlantic and the Saturday Review, or of our mass magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post and Look, or of our betwixt-&-between magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker (which also encroach on the Little Magazine area). There are, however, several big-circulation women's magazines, I suppose because the women's magazine is such an ancient and essential form of journalism that even the English dig it. - 1960 — Dwight Macdonald

PRAISE FOR WALTER ISAACSON'S Steve Jobs "This biography is essential reading." - The New York Times, Holiday Gift Guide "A superbly told story of a superbly lived life." - The Wall Street Journal "Enthralling." - The New Yorker "A frank, smart and wholly unsentimental biography . . . a remarkably sharp, hi-res portrait . . . Steve Jobs is more than a good book; it's an urgently necessary one." - Time "An encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it deserves." - Janet Maslin, The — Walter Isaacson

Even if I never get out of Clover, even if I never get into Northwestern or write for the New Yorker, even if these are just delusions occupying my time, thank God they are, because a life without meaning, without drive or focus, without dreams or goals, isn't life worth living. — Chris Colfer

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining. — Bjarne Stroustrup

It required an enormous amount of energy and time just to do errands like getting groceries. She was always sweaty after she got groceries. — Stephanie Clifford

British rule also left its mark on Hong Kong in a more important and sustainable way. It led to the rise of a people that remains quintessentially Chinese and yet share a way of life, core values and an outlook that resemble at least as much, if not more, that of the average New Yorker or Londoner, rather than that of their compatriots in China. — Steve Tsang

I feel like I'm a New Yorker because I really know the city. I actually tell the drivers where to go - I have this bad habit, I always question the drivers. I do that all the time because I feel like I know the best way, when really it's like, 'Yo, man, shut up. This dude does this every day of his life.' — J. Cole

The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating. — Alison Bechdel

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker. — Mohsin Hamid

[Raymond Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered. — The New Yorker

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

I'm a New Yorker. I was there during 9/11 and I saw how, not only New York City stopped for a moment, we all took an inhale and exhale at the same time - the world united at that time, and it changed my life. — Aisha Hinds

The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism - an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own. — Kathryn Schulz

Fashion somehow, for me, is purely and happily irrational. — Hedi Slimane