Manhattan Transfer Quotes

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts...

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.

But you’re out of another world old kid … You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.

How do I get to Broadway?...I want to get to the center of things.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world. All we can do is go round and round in a squirrel cage.

Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher’s apron who had a baseball cap on backwards.

There’s a rattle of chains and a clatter from the donkeyengine where a tall man in blue overalls stands at a lever in the middle of a cloud of steam that wraps round your face like a wet towel.

I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.

I'm going to drink till when I cut myself whiskey runs out. What's the good of blood when you can have whiskey?

But none of em seem to realize that these things aren’t always a man’s own fault. It’s luck that’s all it is,

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world. All we can do is go round and round in a squirrel cage.

Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I'd like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That's the only sublime thing.

There are lives to be lived if only you didn't care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits . . .?

I’m beginning to learn a few of the things I dont want,” said Herf quietly. “At least I’m beginning to have the nerve to admit to myself how much I dislike all the things I dont want.

Never mind dear. . . . It would have been too rich anyway. . . . You eat that and I’ll let you run out after dinner and buy some candy.” “Oh goody.” “But dont eat the icecream too fast or you’ll have collywobbles.

Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller. . . . There’s jobs all right. . . . I’ll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I’ve worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.

Emile, you’re a goodlooking fellow and steady and you’ll get on in the world. . . . But I’ll never put myself in a man’s power again. . . . I’ve suffered too much. . . . Not if you came to me with five thousand dollars.

Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.

And don't forget this, if a man's a success in New York, he's a success!

But what was it?” “There was a woman upstairs who did illegal operations, abortions. . . . That was what stopped up the plumbing.

That’s very nice of you George. Isn’t it amazing the way girls are getting to look more like Mrs. Castle every day? Just look round this room.

There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will just glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.

There’s a long long trail awinding . . . Over there! Over there! In the subway their eyes pop as they spell out APOCALYPSE, typhus, cholera, shrapnel, insurrection, death in fire, death in water, death in hunger, death in mud.

No, you are saying to yourselves what a bore he is, what use is he to society? He has no money, he has no pretty wife, no good conversation, no tips on the stockmarket. He's a useless fardel on society.... The artist is a fardel.

We are caught up Mr. Perry on a great wave whether we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. A great deal is going to happen in the next few years. All these mechanical inventions—telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless vehicles—they are all leading somewhere. It’s up to us to be on the inside, in the fore-front of progress. . . .

Afterwards they walked east along Fourteenth. “Dutch cant we go to your room?” “I ain’t got no room. The old stiff wont let me stay and she’s got all my stuff. Honest if I dont get a job this week I’m goin to a recruiting sergeant an re-enlist.

Take a plunge, take a plunge . . . they’re all crooks and gamblers anyway . . . take a plunge and come up with your hands full, pockets full, bankaccount full, vaults full of money. If I only dared take the risk. Fool to waste your time fuming about it.

But what can you do with success when you get it? You cant eat it or drink it. Of course I understand that people who havent enough money to feed their faces and all that should scurry round and get it. But success . . .” “The trouble with me is I cant decide what I want most, so my motion is circular, helpless and confoundedly discouraging.” “Oh but God decided that for you. You know all the time, but you wont admit it to yourself.” “I imagine what I want most is to get out of this town, preferably first setting off a bomb under the Times Building.

Do you know I think it is just terrible,” said Mrs. Merivale when she had done carving, “the way you fellows wont tell us any of your experiences over there. . . . Lots of them must have been remarkably interesting. Jimmy I should think you’d write a book about your experiences.

You’ll make twentyfive percent on your money by tomorrow noon. . . . Then if you want to hold you can on a gamble, but if you sell three quarters and hold the rest two or three days on a chance you’re safe as . . . as the Rock of Gibraltar.” “I know Viler, it certainly sounds good. . . . ” “Hell man you dont want to be in this damned office all your life, do you? Think of your little girl.” “I am, that’s the trouble.

The fact of the matter is that an honest man wont soil his hands with politics, and he’s given no inducement to take public office.” “That’s true, a live man, nowadays, wants more money, needs more money than he can make honestly in public life. . . . Naturally the best men turn to other channels.

What I need is a whiskey and soda to settle those cocktails.” “I’ll watch you. I’m a working man. I must be able to tell between the news that’s fit and the news that’s not fit. . . . God I dont want to start talking about that. It’s all so criminally silly. . . . I’ll say that this cocktail sure does knock you for a loop.

Weißt du, Jimmy, ich glaube, es wird ganz lustig sein, ein Weilchen in einer Redaktion zu sitzen." "Ich fände es schon sehr lustig, wenn ich _irgendwo_ sitzen dürfte... Na ja, da bleibe ich eben zu Haus und passe auf das Baby auf." "Sei nicht so verbittert, Jimmy, es ist ja nur vorübergehend." "Das ganze Leben ist nur vorübergehend." (S. 250)

If only I still had faith in words.

Oh I know darling, it's nothing but money in New York.

Le soleil, ruisselant dans le bureau sous les stores baissés, taille dans la fumée des cigares une coupe oblique semblable à de la soie mouillée.

Religion, politics, democracy all that is to keep us asleep. . . . Everybody must go round telling people: Wake up!

Hello. I want to speak to Mr. Jack Cunningham please. . . . Hello. Is this Mr. Cunningham’s office? Mr. James Merivale speaking. . . . Out of town. . . . And when will he be back? . . . Hum.” He strode back along the hall. “The damn scoundrel’s out of town.” “All the years I’ve known him,” said the little lady in the round hat, “that has always been where he was.

Oh it’s all in the day’s work,” said Jimmy. “What gives me gooseflesh is the armies mobilizing, Belgrade bombarded, Belgium invaded . . . all that stuff. I just cant imagine it. . . . They’ve killed Jaures.” “Who’s he?” “A French Socialist.” “Those goddam French are so goddam degenerate all they can do is fight duels and sleep with each other’s wives. I bet the Germans are in Paris in two weeks.

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.

Big snake appears on Fifth Avenue. . . . Ladies screamed and ran in all directions this morning at eleven thirty when a big snake crawled out of a crack in the masonry of the retaining wall of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street and started to cross the sidewalk. . . . ” “Some fish story. . . . ” “That aint nothin,” said an old man. “When I was a boy we used to go snipeshootin on Brooklyn Flats.

He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was rumbling past the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his nostrils. He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.

But how can they make people fight if they dont want to?” “In Europe people are slaves for thousands of years. Not like ‘ere. . . . But I’ve seen war. Very funny. I tended bar in Port Arthur, nutten but a kid den. It was very funny.” “Gee I wish I could get a job as warcorrespondent.” “I might go as a Red Cross nurse.” “Correspondent very good ting. . . . Always drunk in American bar very far from battlefield.” They laughed.

When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls. . . . But now you must listen to me for the last time. . . . For the last time I say. . . . Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside.

Earthquake insurance, gosh they need it dont they? Do you know how long God took to destroy the tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City an Brooklyn an the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven seconds. . . . Saykiddo what’s your name?

Say how much does a woman cost in New York?” “I dunno, expensive I guess. . . . I’m not going ashore to raise hell; I’m going to get a good job and work. Cant you think of nothing but women?” “What’s the use? Why not?” said Congo and settled himself flat on the deck again, burying his dark sootsmudged face in his crossed arms. “I want to get somewhere in the world, that’s what I mean. Europe’s rotten and stinking. In America a fellow can get ahead. Birth dont matter, education dont matter. It’s all getting ahead.

That’s just what you could do,” the woman said in a cracked voice. “That wretched coal man left it this morning and said he’d be back to bring it in. I suppose he’s drunk like the rest of them. I wonder if I can trust you in the house.” “I’m from upstate ma’am,” stammered Bud. “From where?” “From Cooperstown.” “Hum. . . . I’m from Buffalo. This is certainly the city for everyone being from somewhere else. . . . Well you’re probably a burglar’s accomplice, but I cant help it I’ve got to have that coal in. . . . Come in

A ferry was leaving the immigrant station, a murmur rustled through the crowd that packed the edges of the wharf. “Deportees. . . . It’s the communists the Department of Justice is having deported . . . deportees . . . Reds. . . . It’s the Reds they are deporting.” The ferry was out of the slip. In the stern a group of men stood still tiny like tin soldiers. “They are sending the Reds back to Russia.” A handkerchief waved on the ferry, a red handkerchief. People tiptoed gently to the edge of the walk, tiptoeing, quiet like in a sickroom.

Say mister you couldnt tell a feller where a good place was to look for a job?” “Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller. . . . There’s jobs all right. . . . I’ll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I’ve worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.” “Anything that’s a job’ll do me.” “Got a union card?” “I aint got nothin.” “Cant git no job in the buildin trades without a union card,” said the old man. He rubbed the gray bristles of his chin with the back of his hand and leaned over the lamps again.

Are we going to put over this bonus proposition or aint we? . . . We fought for em didnt we, we cleaned up the squareheads, didnt we? And now when we come home we get the dirty end of the stick. No jobs. . . . Our girls have gone and married other fellers. . . . Treat us like a bunch o dirty bums and loafers when we ask for our just and legal and lawful compensation. . . . the bonus. Are we goin to stand for it? . . . No. Are we go into stand for a bunch of politicians treatin us like we was goin round to the back door to ask for a handout? . . . I ask you fellers.

Aloof, as if looking through thick glass into an aquarium, she watched faces, fruit in storewindows, cans of vegetables, jars of olives, redhotpokerplants in a florist's, newspapers, electric signs drifting by. When they passed cross-streets a puff of air came in her face off the river. Sudden jetbright glances of eyes under straw hats, attitudes of chins, thick lips, pouting lips, Cupid's bows, hungry shadow under cheekbones, faces of girls and young men nuzzled fluttering against her like moths as she walked with her stride even to his through the tingling yellow night.

Ou my throat.” “Ruth I wish you werent taking that X-ray treatment. . . . I’ve heard it’s very dangerous. Dont let me alarm you about it my dear . . . but I have heard of cases of cancer contracted that way.” “That’s nonsense Billy. . . . That’s only when X-rays are improperly used, and it takes years of exposure. . . . No I think this Dr. Warner’s a remarkable man.

Say Joe what’s the dope about this war business?” “I guess they are in for it this time. . . . I’ve known it was coming ever since the Agadir incident.” “Jez I like to see somebody wallop the pants off England after the way they wont give home rule to Ireland.” “We’d have to help em. . . . Any way I dont see how this can last long. The men who control international finance wont allow it. After all it’s the banker who holds the purse strings.” “We wouldn’t come to the help of England, no sir, not after the way they acted in Ireland and in the Revolution and in the Civil War. . . . ” “Joey you’re getting all choked up with that history you’re reading up in the public library every night. . . . You follow the stock quotations and keep on your toes and dont let em fool you with all this newspaper talk about strikes and upheavals and socialism. . . . I’d like to see you make good Joey. . . . Well I guess I’d better be going.

born and raised in Honolulu but had spent four years of his childhood flying kites and catching crickets in Indonesia. After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.

Couldn’t you let us see the baby, miss?” The nurse nodded. She was a lanternjawed grayfaced woman with tight lips. “I hate her,” whispered Susie. “She gives me the fidgets that woman does; she’s nothing but a mean old maid.” “Never mind dear, it’s just for a day or two.” Susie closed her eyes. “Do you still want to call her Ellen?” The nurse brought back a basket and set it on the bed beside Susie. “Oh isn’t she wonderful!” said Ed. “Look she’s breathing. . . . And they’ve oiled her.” He helped his wife to raise herself on her elbow; the yellow coil of her hair unrolled, fell over his hand and arm. “How can you tell them apart nurse?” “Sometimes we cant,” said the nurse, stretching her mouth in a smile. Susie was looking querulously into the minute purple face. “You’re sure this is mine.” “Of course.” “But it hasnt any label on it.” “I’ll label it right away.” “But mine was dark.” Susie lay back on the pillow, gasping for breath. “She has lovely little light fuzz just the color of your hair.” Susie stretched her arms out above her head and shrieked: “It’s not mine. It’s not mine. Take it away. . . . That woman’s stolen my baby.

Ellen got off the bus at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fiftythird Street. Rosy twilight was gushing out of the brilliant west, glittered in brass and nickel, on buttons, in people's eyes. All the windows on the east side of the avenue were aflame. As she stood with set teeth on the curb waiting to cross, a frail tendril of fragrance brushed her face. A skinny lad with towhair stringy under a foreignlooking cap was offering her arbutus in a basket. She bought a bunch and pressed her nose in it. May woods melted like sugar against her palate. The whistle blew, gears ground as cars started to pour out of the side streets, the crossing thronged with people. Ellen felt the lad brush against her as he crossed at her side. She shrank away. Through the smell of the arbutus she caught for a second the unwashed smell of his body, the smell of immigrants, of Ellis Island, of crowded tenements. Under all the nickelplated, goldplated streets enameled with May, uneasily she could feel the huddling smell, spreading in dark slow crouching masses like corruption oozing from broken sewers, like a mob. She walked briskly down the cross-street. She went in a door beside a small immaculately polished brass plate.

if consumer demand should increase for the goods or services of any private business, the private firm is delighted; it woos and welcomes the new business and expands its operations eagerly to fill the new orders. Government, in contrast, generally meets this situation by sourly urging or even ordering consumers to “buy” less, and allows shortages to develop, along with deterioration in the quality of its service. Thus, the increased consumer use of government streets in the cities is met by aggravated traffic congestion and by continuing denunciations and threats against people who drive their own cars. The New York City administration, for example, is continually threatening to outlaw the use of private cars in Manhattan, where congestion has been most troublesome. It is only government, of course, that would ever think of bludgeoning consumers in this way; it is only government that has the audacity to “solve” traffic congestion by forcing private cars (or trucks or taxis or whatever) off the road. According to this principle, of course, the “ideal” solution to traffic congestion is simply to outlaw all vehicles! But this sort of attitude toward the consumer is not confined to traffic on the streets. New York City, for example, has suffered periodically from a water “shortage.” Here is a situation where, for many years, the city government has had a compulsory monopoly of the supply of water to its citizens. Failing to supply enough water, and failing to price that water in such a way as to clear the market, to equate supply and demand (which private enterprise does automatically), New York’s response to water shortages has always been to blame not itself, but the consumer, whose sin has been to use “too much” water. The city administration could only react by outlawing the sprinkling of lawns, restricting use of water, and demanding that people drink less water. In this way, government transfers its own failings to the scapegoat user, who is threatened and bludgeoned instead of being served well and efficiently. There has been similar response by government to the ever-accelerating crime problem in New York City. Instead of providing efficient police protection, the city’s reaction has been to force the innocent citizen to stay out of crime-prone areas. Thus, after Central Park in Manhattan became a notorious center for muggings and other crime in the night hours, New York City’s “solution” to the problem was to impose a curfew, banning use of the park in those hours. In short, if an innocent citizen wants to stay in Central Park at night, it is he who is arrested for disobeying the curfew; it is, of course, easier to arrest him than to rid the park of crime. In short, while the long-held motto of private enterprise is that “the customer is always right,” the implicit maxim of government operation is that the customer is always to be blamed.

Sam Anderson. “The Greatest Novel.” New York Magazine (outline). Jan. 9, 2011. New York is, famously, the everything bagel of megalopolises—one of the world’s most diverse cities, defined by its churning mix of religions, ethnicities, social classes, attitudes, lifestyles, etc., ad infinitum. This makes it a perfect match for the novel, a genre that tends to share the same insatiable urge. In choosing the best New York novel, then, my first instinct was to pick something from the city’s proud tradition of megabooks—one of those encyclopedic ambition bombs that attempt to capture, New Yorkily, the full New Yorkiness of New York. Something like, to name just a quick armful or two, Manhattan Transfer, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, Invisible Man, Winter’s Tale, or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—or possibly even one of the tradition’s more modest recent offspring, like Lush Life and Let the Great World Spin. In the end, however, I decided that the single greatest New York novel is the exact opposite of all of those: a relatively small book containing absolutely zero diversity. There are no black or Hispanic or Asian characters, no poor people, no rabble-rousers, no noodle throwers or lapsed Baha’i priests or transgender dominatrixes walking hobos on leashes through flocks of unfazed schoolchildren. Instead there are proper ladies behaving properly at the opera, and more proper ladies behaving properly at private balls, and a phlegmatic old Dutch patriarch dismayed by the decline of capital-S Society. The book’s plot hinges on a subtly tragic love triangle among effortlessly affluent lovers. It is 100 percent devoted to the narrow world of white upper-class Protestant heterosexuals. So how can Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence possibly be the greatest New York novel of all time?

One sizable gift came in 1994, when he gave enough to be listed as a “founder” of the Penn Club’s new location in midtown Manhattan. The minimum gift for that category was $150,000. Two autumns later, Donald Trump Jr. arrived at the leafy campus. In all, three of the four older Trump children—including Ivanka (transferring after two years at Georgetown) and Tiffany—would attend Penn, making the school almost an inheritance, a family emblem. In

Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus—a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism—had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1943, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn. What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.