Nyc Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Nyc. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Scars fade with time. And the ones that never go away, well, they build character, maturity, caution.
Erin McCarthy (The Pregnancy Test (Sexy in NYC, #1))
Love, no matter how it’s expressed, is still love. We all have flaws, and so our love will be flawed. But that doesn’t diminish it.
Erin McCarthy (The Pregnancy Test (Sexy in NYC, #1))
A very powerful and nefarious man is speaking to one of his henchmen "Tell me again how you erased the last remaining Moreno family member in NYC, ........You do recall that little job I asked you to take care of?
William J. Borak (STRANGER ON THE SHORE)
NYC Institute has one. I'll show you sometime if you want. It's a date. It is maybe the least romantic spot in the Institute, by the way. You'll make up for that, I'm sure. (Jeez, get a locked room on unsanctified ground, you two.)
Cassandra Clare (The Shadowhunter's Codex)
A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” she said. “I was born out of New York. The things that are most wrong here summoned me. ("Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds")
Ray Bradbury (Long After Midnight)
I think perfect love is any time you love unconditionally, without selfish intent, without concern for personal gain.
Erin McCarthy (The Pregnancy Test (Sexy in NYC, #1))
New York takes from her, sometimes. But she takes too. She takes its muggy air in fistfuls, and she packs it into the cracks in her heart.
Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.
Ann Douglas
That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weather wane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.
Amor Towles (Rules of Civility)
...for the last twelve months I've been more single than a one-dollar bill."~Sammy
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
I find it difficult to relate to people who enjoy discussing the utterly uninteresting and unchangeable facts of life.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
I sleep on a tar roof scream my songs into lazy floods of stars… a white powder paddles through blood and heart and the returns pure and easy… This city is on my side.
Jim Carroll (Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems)
...being in love can change almost anything: from your expectations and limitations to your very life plans. It's a completely unpredictable force. And how it operates within any particular relationship is a total mystery to anyone outside of that...
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Every person is a puzzle with a password. By solving the puzzle, the potential for emotional and physical intimacy is realized.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Empire State's orange shoulders lifted above the Hell
Allen Ginsberg (The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971)
Her bun was baking, but her bloody heart was breaking.
Erin McCarthy (The Pregnancy Test (Sexy in NYC, #1))
I think I can safely say I am the only guy in NYC in possession of two cocks. Is that a bonus or what?
Jodi Knight
@SeanCassinova Where might one procure a shoe horn in NYC? @RugbyFan101 to @SeanCassinova I’ll loan you my horn any day of the week, baby ;-) @SeanCassinova to @RugbyFan101 Who is this and where did you get my number? @RugbyFan101 to @SeanCassinova Uh, this is Twitter. @SeanCassinova to @RugbyFan101 That’s a very strange name. What were your parents thinking? @EilishCassidy @SeanCassinova Stop being an arse.
L.H. Cosway (The Player and the Pixie (Rugby, #2))
Glory be to those humans that are absolutely NOTHING for the opinions of other humans: they are the true owners of illusions, transformations, and themselves.” NYC in 1979
Kathy Acker
Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship - that of parent and child - begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together, and the fact that the child was born to its particular parents instead of to another couple is pure happenstance. Thus, children have no choice over the relationship that is most important to their existence. By contrast, friends and lovers choose each other, but even these choices are reactions to whatever random coincidence made the resulting relationship possible.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that’s broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.
Jardine Libaire (White Fur)
Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.
Imogen Binnie (Nevada)
Check my riddle, and I’ll let you play my fiddle.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Love is like magic, volatile, beautiful, and scary.
Jaymin Eve (Queen Alpha (NYC Mecca, #2))
There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.
Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn)
Everyone in New York City thinks they are famous without being famous.
Ethan H. Minsker
Dating someone exclusively for four months in New York is like four years in Anchorage.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
I wrote this HAIKU cuz today NYC definitely looks like a wonderland. ENJOY what is winter but a pastry chef gone crazy frosting all in sight Robin Glasser have fun in the snow
Robin Glasser
Money talks and bullshit walks in New York. In a lot of cities, probably—but here, the nation’s shrine to unrestricted predatory capitalism, money has nearly talismanic power. Which means that he can use it as a talisman.
N.K. Jemisin (The City We Became (Great Cities, #1))
Friday’s “Working Lunch” is at The Avenue on St James's Street. It’s a bit like eating in an art installation, a White-Out affair that tries for a So-Serious NYC feel, but is occupied by Daddy’s Girls wearing pashmina’s and too many Pin Stripes worn by too many people called Hugo.
Simon Pont (Remember to Breathe)
Can I speak to Sayvyer, please?” “You’re looking for the savior? At 1:15 a.m.?” “No. her name’s Sayvyer.” “There’s no savior here. Especially not at 1:15 a.m.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
As Narc became busier at work, he developed a bold new dating philosophy. His idea of a perfect first date was doggy-style, followed by a cup of coffee. He just didn’t have the time or patience for anything resembling conventional courtship patterns and felt too depressed to be the charming smooth talker that he had once been.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren’t immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
falafel joint, jazz joint, gyro joint, corner. Schoolyard, creperie, realtor, corner. Tenement, tenement, tenement museum, corner. Pink Pony, Blind Tiger, muffin boutique, corner. Sex shop, tea shop, synagogue, corner. Bollywood, Buddha, botanica, corner. Leather outlet, leather outlet, leather outlet, corner. Bar, school, bar, school. People's Park, corner. Tyson mural, Celia Cruz mural, Ladi Di mural, corner. Bling shop, barbershop, car service corner.
Richard Price (Lush Life)
Love?" Heeb asked, playfully pretending not to know the concept. "Yeah. The real thing. The conviction that if you had this one woman, all other women would become irrelevant. You'd never again be unhappy. And you'd give up anything to have her and keep her." *Evan*
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
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 (Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism)
What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.
Don DeLillo
That being in love can change almost anything: from your expectations and limitations to your very life plans. It's a completely unpredictable force. And how it operates within any particular relationship is a total mystery to anyone outside of that relationship.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.
Dallas Athent
Oh no. I'm not gonna let you leave yet. I'm gonna show you the value of takin' your time to get to work. I probably should have done this a long time ago.
Zack Love (The Doorman)
Manhattan is a narrow island off the coast of New Jersey devoted to the pursuit of lunch.
Raymond Sokolov
Drinking and cycling is like drinking and flirting—it’s pretty likely you’re going to wind up hitting something, and the results are probably going to be ugly.
BikeSnobNYC (Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling)
Oh. Well was this your first time painting a live model?” She nodded her head, with an almost guilty look on her face. “What’s it like?” “Hard,” she replied.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Hope was a strange thing. Once it found its way into your heart, your soul, it was almost impossible to get it out.
Jaymin Eve (Queen Alpha (NYC Mecca, #2))
The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.
Joan Rivers (Enter Talking)
I have never learned how to tell somebody something good about myself; that should be a secret they must find out .
Joan Rivers (Enter Talking)
This morning I wake to the blue-white light of an approaching spring in New York: the kind of light that promises it will not be this cold forever.
Tre Miller Rodriguez (Splitting the Difference: A Heart-Shaped Memoir)
Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.
Joan Rivers (Enter Talking)
Oh God. Goddammit. I never got to see the pyramids. Or the Taj Mahal. I ...I never even got to leave the country." "Don't sweat it, brother. You got to live in NYC. You didn't miss shit.
Brian K. Vaughan
But despite these and many other differences, Evan and Heeb had become close friends – an improbability that could have been produced only by the even greater improbabilities that brought them together.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
I am a citizen of this country,” I declare, “and Mr. Mayor, tonight I will be a citizen of this city when I put my shoes under my bed. The courageous men, women and children who are with me (blocked from crossing the bridge into NYC) are also citizens of this country and will be sleeping near their shoes too. I want them with me tonight, here, in the city of New York. We are all American citizens.” — Mother Jones
Jerry Ash
I am more of an herb guy than a spice guy. It comes back to a certain conservatism I have regarding food. The French are not big on spices; they use more herbs. I know the spices used in European cooking and use them in moderation. I am not going to serve a dish that is wildly nutmegged!" David Waltuck, Chanterelle NYC
Karen Page
Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.
Lorraine Hansberry
Any relationship with long-term potential has a honeymoon period, however brief, marked by the happy illusion that one's lover might be uniquely perfect. This fool's paradise is sustained by the elaborate deception artfully employed in every courtship: the diplomatic dodging of difficult issues, the careful concealing of unflattering flaws, and the strategic stressing of charming virtues. But as trust increases and each person grows weary of maintaining this initial beguilement, the blissfully blurry lens through which the other is perceived eventually refocuses to a clearer picture.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Just what she needed. She was single and pregnant and her nipples had suddenly become supersensitive $luts looking for action.
Erin McCarthy (The Pregnancy Test (Sexy in NYC, #1))
Everything about riding a bicycle compels you towards beauty.
BikeSnobNYC (Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling)
even in the darkest of times one couldn’t skip out on the beauty of life and love. None of us knew how many tomorrows we would get.
Leia Stone (Queen Mecca (NYC Mecca, #4))
You can't tell. That's something I'm learning here in N.Y.C: you have no fucking idea what people are really like. They're not even two-faced--they're, like, multiple personalities.
Jennifer Egan
It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle vines and no balconies and no guitars, it was meant for love. For living and for love, and the two were inseparable; one didn't come without the other. ("Too Nice A Day To Die")
Cornell Woolrich (Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel)
What’s SQ?” asked Evan. “Sexual Quotient.” “What’s that?” “Basically, it’s your odds of getting laid. Everyone has an SQ. just like everyone has an IQ.” “I’ve never heard that term before.” “That’s because I made it up.” “That figures. Finally applying your actuarial skills to what really matters, eh?
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.
Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)
New York isn’t jobs, they reply, it’s temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.
Vivian Gornick (The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir)
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.
Zack Love (The Doorman)
So...Now that we got that over with, let's get back to love at first sight, Evan said. Not infatuation at first sight...Love. With a capital L, he clarified. Love? Heeb asked, playfully pretending not to know the concept. Yeah. The real thing. The conviction that if you had this one woman, all other women would become irrelevant. You'd never again be unhappy And you'd give up anything to have her and keep her. You've experienced that? Only once. And I haven't stopped thinking about it ever since. Tell me more. Sometimes I think that I still chase women just to forget about her. Because I know I can never have her. But I can't seem to forget about her, no matter what girl I'm chasing...No one can possibly compare.... Who is she? Delilah, Evan said wistfully. Delilah?, asked Heeb, intrigued Delilah Nakova, Evan replied, with a hint of awe and reverence in his voice.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
A new star has been born and Vera’s performance brings alive the desolate life of O’Neil’s young heroine in a natural talent that is so fresh and yet so ageless.
Rajiv Kapoor (Lights: Despair, Faith, and Hope on Broadway)
You have got to be good in that town if you want to beat the crowd.' So says young John on his first sight of New York City. THE CROWD (1928)
Steven Jay Schneider (1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die)
Reading is the true foundation of our civil liberties.
Patricia O'Hara (Bleecker Street. . . .The journey of Lovie Maroon)
While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem.
S.J. Rozan (Dark City Lights: New York Short Stories (Have a NYC, #4))
Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…
Joan Rivers (Enter Talking)
Liked" was the kiss of death. "Loved" or "hated" interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion.
Joan Rivers (Enter Talking)
I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.
Joan Rivers (Enter Talking)
I don’t want to marry you. I just want you to give me an orgasm.” “Just the one? You have low expectations.
Sarah Morgan (Miracle on 5th Avenue (From Manhattan with Love, #3))
I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.
Richard Price
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban nights are like the night there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers. They are immaterial; that is to say, one sees but the lighted windows. Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the Aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
The male tax?” “Yeah. The tax that men have to pay for not having to menstruate every month. Or risk getting pregnant. Or deal with the physically stronger sex in a macho world… Women have to put up with all that stuff, so the least we men can do is pay the male tax and get the tab.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
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?
Zack Love (Stories and Scripts: an Anthology)
Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.
Lorraine Hansberry (To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography)
There are many ways to define what it means to be a geek, but certainly one definition has to be, "Someone who does something normal people do, only while wearing special pants and talking about it constantly.
BikeSnobNYC
Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.
Lorraine Hansberry (To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography)
It is no surprise this is the reputed to be the greatest city in the world. It is a blob of brick and neon connected by the arterial subway, equal parts fear and wonder. It breathes, more robotic than organic, but alive.
Thomm Quackenbush (Holidays with Bigfoot)
The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)
Tara Leigh Cobble (Crowded Skies: Letters To Manhattan)
ERIC: What are you always writin' in that book anyway? RODNEY: Poetry. TYRONE: Poetry? Rodney stops sketching and sentimentally flips through a few dozen pages of sketches and handwritten poems and notes. RODNEY: Poetry and pictures. Snapshots of our lives developed in the darkrooms of our souls." From CENTRAL PARK SONG -- a screenplay
Zack Love (Stories and Scripts: an Anthology)
I wanted to love the city. There is an electricity to the dullest day here that overpowers its clinging aroma. Friends have moved cityward, rarely seen again, each acting as though they relocated to Shangri-La, despite muggings and struggling.
Thomm Quackenbush (Holidays with Bigfoot)
She wanted to walk slowly and smell the wafting perfumes of bouquets that men had bought for their sweethearts and watch couples holding each other tight as they dashed along the pavement on their way to or from something that made them grateful to be in each other's company. Going home felt the same as going to sleep, and she was too bouncing, too overcome with bliss for that.
Anna Godbersen
The change will do you good,” she said simply, when he had finished; “and you must be sure to go and see Ellen,” she added, looking him straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty. It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: “Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathize with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. I also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you this evening, the hint that has made you so irritable… Hints have indeed not been wanting; but since you appear unwilling to take them from others, I offer you this one myself, in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose; and that, since you are sure to see her, I wish you to do so with my full and explicit approval—and to take the opportunity of letting her know what the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to.” Her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this mute message reached him. She turned the wick down, lifted off the globe, and breathed on the sulky flame. “They smell less if one blows them out,” she explained, with her bright housekeeping air. On the threshold she turned and paused for his kiss.
Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)
As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.
Vivian Gornick (The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir)
I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.
Nora Ephron
We’ve entered dangerous territory. You can’t kiss someone with so much emotion if you’re preparing to walk away. Alarms ring through my head, too loud and too obvious to be ignored. There are way too many complex emotions being passed between us. I already know he’s going to shatter my heart.
Jennifer Ann (Adam's List (NYC Love, #1))
Fear is the primary tool of the mafiya. It's how they contain their vast criminal enterprise. For the mafiya, fear is the grease in the wheel. Fear is much stronger than love | Fear lasts much longer. Love fades and is replaced by hatred and contempt. Fear lingers and brings forth other emotions such as doubt. Fear encourages procrastination and cowardice. Besides, you always hurt the ones you love. Most are too afraid to hurt the ones they fear.
Gary Govich (Career Criminal: My Life in the Russian Mob Until the Day I Died)
I’m just not ready to give myself up, Sammy. I mean, there’s something perfect about virginity, and I haven’t found someone who deserves to take that perfection from me…” “You’re loco, Carlos. Insane. Totally crazy… Most guys think they’re imperfect for still being virgins past the age of seventeen.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
The official recruiting process for their posse began. Because Carlos, Narc, and Trevor each had high SQs, Heeb and Evan reasoned that adding the three to their group would raise the average SQ of each group member (much the way that colleges recruit individuals with higher test scores to increase the average test scores of their matriculated students).
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
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.
Gary Govich (Career Criminal: My Life in the Russian Mob Until the Day I Died)
As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed. Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.
Jardine Libaire (White Fur)
Really, in a lot of ways being a cyclist is like being a vampire. First of all, both cyclists and vampires are cultural outcasts with cult followings who clumsily walk the line between cool and dorky. Secondly, both cyclists and vampires resemble normal humans, but they also lead secret double lives, have supernatural powers, and aren’t governed by the same rules as the rest of humanity—though cycling doesn’t come with the drawbacks of vampirism. Cyclists can ride day or night, we can consume all the garlic we want, and very few of us are afflicted with bloodlust or driven by a relentless urge to kill.
BikeSnobNYC (Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling)
Carlos, your mysophobia does affect my health. I feel freer – more alive, more vivacious and, ironically enough, healthier – if I’m not constantly made to worry about germs and unhealthy choices. Whether it’s for a moment of spontaneous kissing in a phone booth or eating an occasional hamburger…Obsessing about your health doesn’t actually make you healthier. The fact of the matter is, Carlos, our bodies are decaying at every moment, regardless of what we do. Living is bad for your health.” “It doesn’t have to be.” “Maybe if you live in an antiseptic bubble specially designed by the CDC it doesn’t. But in a place like New York City, you’re fighting a pointless battle. You can either embrace the dirt and the germs as part of the risky joy of living in an exciting, overpopulated metropolis, or you can spend lots of mental real estate obsessing over whether you touched a few extra microbes when you got on the subway.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))
Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the ‘real black world,’ preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest ‘black’ music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they’ll assert hegemony in areas that don’t much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell: their own vocabulary, syntax, gestures, music, dance; own food; religious rhetoric; social and party customs; that…well-known athletic superiority—the foot-speed, vertical leap—we like them in fields, cotton- or ball-. It’s a Hell we like to look at because it has so clearly been made someone else’s very own….And the exported popular arts! The singing and dancing!…each innovation, new Scene, and genius born of a ‘suffering’ we somehow long to imagine, even as we co-opt, overpay, homogenize, make the best of that suffering song go to stud for our own pale performers.
David Foster Wallace (Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present)
Here’s the thing about falling for someone who’s already given up; there’s no promise of tomorrow. There aren’t any words of comfort that can be said, no glimpse of a positive change. Every moment, every thought could be their last. It’s like you’re helplessly walking into quicksand, waiting for the muck to cover your mouth and eyes until you can no longer find a way to breathe. No, it’s more like jumping from a high bridge without the promise of water underneath. And I fucking hate heights.
Jennifer Ann (Adam's List (NYC Love, #1))
Speaking of body decorations, I luuhhhvv your belly piercing!” Heeb said, looking at the gold ring in the center of her slim, tan waist. Despite the artic cold, Angelina had opted for a skin tight, black tube top that ended just above her belly, on the assumption that a warm cab, a winter coat, and a short wait to get into the club was an adequate frosty weather strategy. Heeb was still reverently staring at her belly when Angelina finally caught her breath from laughing. “Do you really like it? You’re just saying that so that you can check out my belly!” “And what’s so bad about that? I mean, didn’t you get that belly piercing so that people would check out your belly?” “No. I just thought it would look cool…Do you have any piercings?” “Actually, I do,” Heeb replied. “Where?” “My appendix.” “Huh?” “I wanted to be the first guy with a pierced organ. And the appendix is a totally useless organ anyway, so I figured why the hell not?” “That’s pretty original,” she replied, amused. “Oh yeah. I’ve outdone every piercing fanatic out there. The only problem is when I have to go through metal detectors at the airport.” Angelina burst into laughs again, and then managed to say, “Don’t you have to take it out occasionally for a cleaning?” “Nah. I figure I’ll just get it removed when my appendix bursts. It’ll be a two for one operation, if you know what I mean.
Zack Love (Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC (Back When Phones Weren't So Smart))