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Nyc Quotes

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Nyc Quotes

“New York was like the internet before the internet. A densely populated, hectic, ever-evolving place that’s always on, that you extract yourself from in order to rest, to catch your breath, and will be there in full force when you’re ready for it again. The city that never sleeps. Interconnected in a grand plexus by a series of subnetworks and subsystems. Shiny parts and seedy parts. Covered in ads, understated and overstated. Multicultural. Everybody’s here, every language is spoken. The anonymous mistaken for the rude: people here get away with saying how they feel, speaking their truths.”

“This was a quarrel they did not need | It was one they knew they could never win. Beat us with a bat and we come back with Jiggers | Stick us with a knife and we bring the heaters | Plug one of us, and you'd better murder us all. We were the authentic spectacle, and the fact they left with their lives intact, no bones broken, or a limb missing, was miracle enough.”

“While the layman sees an opportunity and decides to take it, the professional criminal through the use of deceit and treachery, is able to create opportunities. This individual not only actively searches for a crime to commit, the professional criminal assembles teams of similar people and generates situations in which crime can be safely perpetrated in a controlled environment for maximum profit.”

“For those of you that truly believe there's no such thing as the mafiya, I would be more than happy to sell you your own fast lane on the Belt Parkway, you know, so you can avoid the rush hour commute. The mafiya is real as a heart attack and, contrary to popular consensus, has been steadily growing in power since its inception in the 1920s. Italian organized crime just doesn't operate out in the open anymore, former mayor Rudy made sure of that.”

“I revealed my affection towards my former employer and felt sick at myself for betraying him. My grandfather stood and poured me another tall glass. He offered me a sour tomato to take the edge off of the vodka. Pappy pulled his chair up next to mine then put his oversized arm around my shoulder and offered me his wisdom. "Feel no pity for this man James," he whispered. "A fool and his money are lucky to come together in the first place. More so, it's the responsibility of much smarter, more dubious men to party them," he finished.”

“At one point, I began to think that I had a divine doorman. Lenny was the most unlikely incarnation of God I could imagine, and yet, I kept drifting irresistibly towards this absurd conclusion. Despite my staunchly atheistic inclinations, I couldn't explain Lenny any other way. But eventually I came to my senses and realized that he was just one of those game show freaks with an encyclopedic memory. That didn't make him God, did it? Would God proclaim so regularly how much he likes Patsy's Pizza?”

“I had always been an atheist until I met Lenny. He was too wonderously complex and good for there to be no benevolent and intelligent force behind our marvelous cosmos. Lenny gave me the actual proof my fiercely skeptical mind had always demanded. Not some logical, 37-step proof of God's existence. It was a personal proof. And it was irrefutable.”

“Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being deal and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman... After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own - they are the day's messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.”

“Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The map is altered and time is telescoped. Daylight restores things to their normal condition, or is that really their normal condition? The map of the city wrinkles and unfolds, wrinkles and unfolds.”

“Titus, have you ever had your heart broken?” “Oh, son. How could you ask a man who used to play the blues a question like that?” “How long does it take to go away?” “A broken heart?” “Yeah.” “There’s no precise formula, Sammy.” “Just give me an estimate.” “A good rule of thumb is at least half the time that you were in love. Or twice the time. It all just depends.”

“Whatever my future held, I was certain it wouldn’t be borne on the bitter wind that blew along Broadway. It was waiting in a place where lime-green leaves burst forth from soil the color of night, where flowers bloomed under skies on fire, where pariah dogs fucked in the streets and wild monkeys called in the twilight—a place where women smiled and the moon smiled with them.”

“If you are in NYC and you only do one thing culturally go and see Carol Lipnik at Pangea. If you love music and appreciate great songwriting and singing, if you came to NYC to experience magical happenings in tiny rooms that could never happen anyplace else in the world, if you dreamed of intimate nights surrounded by smart, talented, interesting people, this is what you're here for. Now DON'T MISS IT!!!!”

“I had an unorthodox high-school experience; I shifted around to different schools. When I got to college and met Larry Sacharow, who ran the theatre department [at Fordham University in NYC], he was the first person to say ‘I believe in you.’ At that point, I just needed someone to say ‘I see you, I get you, let’s go.’ It’s an amazing thing to borrow someone else’s confidence in you; it can change your life.”

“When I was young, I wanted to be a movie star. But I realized that you have no control being an actor. So I went to architecture school in NYC, because I was crazy about buildings. Then I began to realize that I got more excited about Vogue coming out each month than I was about my projects.”

“Half of NYC's homeless populations are families.Homeless people have been ignored for too long. I'll just say this: If you are a family on the brink of eviction you are 80% less likely to get evicted if you have legal counsel. However, there is no right to legal counsel in housing court.It would cost the city $12,500 to grant that family legal counsel. Meanwhile, the average stay for a homeless family in a shelter once they have been evicted cost the city $45,000. So not only does it seem like the right thing to do morally, it's also the right thing to do fiscally.”