New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments, --constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall. . James Weldon Johnson
This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/ Whatever interests the rest interests me
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Walt Whitman
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...
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Walter Kirn
In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies.
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Brandon Stanton
When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.
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Adelle Waldman
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does
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Groucho Marx
More Quotes By James Weldon Johnson
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by...
There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of...
