NEW YORK QUOTES

Beautiful Quotes about New York want to tell you a couple of things you should know before you get there. Wouldn’t you love to hear about the city from the people who had actually been there? These messages will get you started. But, you might still want to see the New York city for yourself and share your own thoughts. We can’t wait to hear that xx

“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”

-Dorothy Parker

“If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.”

-Peter Shaffer

“New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something.”

-Lindsey Kelk

“Life in New York was like being in a giant bookstore: all these trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city’s beating heart, saying, I make no promises but I offer many doors.”

-Emily Henry

“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

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does.”

-Groucho Marx

GO TO NEW YORK • BEAUTIFUL NEW YORK QUOTES THAT MAKE YOU TRAVEL

“The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn’t matter if you are younger or old. Reading our rich history makes the experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves.

For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias.

That’s why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city’s magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man.

Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it’s your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze.”

-Pete Hamill

“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,

“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

“When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere.”

-Jimmy Breslin

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”

-Jonathan Lethem

SOPHISTICATED DELIGHT • BEAUTIFUL QUOTES ABOUT NEW YORK THAT MAKE YOU TRAVEL

“My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.”

-Walter Kirn

“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

“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”

-Simone de Beauvoir

“There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.”

-Elbert Hubbard

“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

“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

“New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.”

-Truman Capote

LIKE POETRY • QUOTES ABOUT NEW YORK THAT MAKE YOU TRAVEL

“While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.”

-Raquel Cepeda

“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

“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

“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

“Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn’t got.”

-Robert Benchley

“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

“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

MYSTERY AND BEAUTY OF THE NY CITY

“You haven’t lived until you died in New York.”

-Alexander Woollcott

“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

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

-John Updike

“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

A SENSE OF THE SUBLIME • NY

“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

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”

-Tom Wolfe

“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.”