1
I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.Brandi L. Bates
2
You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.Jennifer Echols
3
That was when I first observed a phenomenon I now call the "New York Slide": you offer your words to try to communicate and connect with someone, but your words just hit a brick wall the person has erected to ward off human contact- the words slide down it and roll away.Kelly Cutrone
4
Though Alec had never seen the occupants of the first floor loft, they seemed to be engaged in a tempestuous romance. Once there had been a bunch of someone's belongings strewn all over the landing with a note attached to a jacket lapel addressed to "A lying liar who lies." Right now there was a bouquet of flowers taped to the door with a card tucked among the blooms that read I'M SORRY. That was the thing about New York: you always knew more about your neighbors' business than you wanted to.Cassandra Clare
5
She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.Anna Godbersen
6
The sad fact is, there are 7.220.400.641 people on the planet, but right now I haven't got a single one to talk to.Holly Smale
7
Why do you always rescue me?" – "Every Cinderella needs a fairy godmother. But sometimes your fairy godmother needs you right back.Holly Smale
8
And this way, l'll leave everything behind before it gets the chance to do the same to me.Holly Smale
9
Love puts itself first, and makes its own plans. It maps you out instead. Maybe that's what makes it perfectHolly Smale
10
They say that life is just a blank chain, and precious moments are the beads we hang off it to make it beautiful.Holly Smale
11
I can change my plans. But I can't change my family.Holly Smale
12
My Best Friend and I have spent plenty of time together, despite me being in my First Ever Relationship. This is because friends should always come first.Holly Smale
13
Reason to move to New York: I don't to get left behindHolly Smale
14
As soon as I laid eyes on him, it all came flooding back, all the reasons why I loved him, all the reasons why I hadn't been able to let him go.Lindsey Kelk
15
New York is a glorious place for clearing your head and finding inspiration. Every time you step outside, you live a dozen lives.Lindsey Kelk
16
But I did go back and soon I realized why. I was in loveLindsey Kelk
17
Hawaii was paradise, Milan was beautiful but New York was electric.Lindsey Kelk
18
Al: Now, remind me, who's walking who down the aisle again?Lindsey Kelk
19
Every New Yorker thinks they’re automatically better than everyone else in every other city on the planet: even their unnems were a better class of beggars.Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
20
Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.Christopher Hitchens
21
New York! " he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.Ralph Ellison
22
These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.Wait–Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years. And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting–the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending–has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.Paul Krugman
23
It sucks. I used to be governor of New York.Eliot Spitzer
24
One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an 'out' group, let alone a whole sex or gender.Christopher Hitchens
25
They radiated that orgasm-free lifestyle so unique and universal among Seabrook women.Holly Peterson
26
Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship. There was a raw, feral beauty about this landscape that was totally unselfconscious but no less real.. There was no pomp or vainty here; this was an innocent, natural beauty, the best kind, like a woman first thing in the morning, lit up by the sun streaming through a window, who doesn't quite believe it when you tell her how beautiful she is. .Leonardo Donofrio
27
Honest dishonesty. That’s quite the oxymoron — but I like the originality that you’ve brought to bear in the art of rationalization. Maybe you should consider becoming a lawyer, ” he added jokingly.Zack Love
28
History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights)Kat Georges
29
That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)Eve Kagan
30
I'm older now, I'm a man getting near middle age, putting on a little fat and I still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seventh streets, they're all out then, making believe they're shopping, in their furs and their crazy hats, everything all concentrated from all over the world into eight blocks, the best furs, the best clothes, the handsomest women, out to spend money and feeling good about it, looking coldly at you, making believe they're not looking at you as you go past.Irwin Shaw
31
The SleepingI have imagined all this: In 1940 my parents were in love And living in the loft on West 10thAbove Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses On their bedroom walls the night they got married. I can guess why he did it. My mother’s hair was the color of yellow apples And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas. I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight. It is hard for me to imagine that My parents made love in a roomful of roses And I wasn’t there. But now I am. My mother is blushing. This is the wonderful thing about art. It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping As it might have late that night When my father and mother made love above RothkoWho lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses.Lynn Emanuel
32
Marriage is a mystery that one would be wise not to solve too hastily.--- Marve De Jong, Love And Other Follies Of The Great Families Of Old New YorkAnna Godbersen
33
America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4, 000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again. Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.Bill Bryson
34
Back in the "leather and lace" eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan–punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish.Terri Windling
35
And you can do far more for us from America than you can from here, where you’re just another defenseless Christian. So if you really want to help, Inas, then you’ll go to the very best school you can get into and earn the best grades you can.Zack Love
36
YOUR TWIN-FLAME IS ON BACK ORDER.THE HEAVENLY FATHER IS BUILDING YOUR SOULMATE TAILOR MADE FOR YOU SPECIAL ORDER.WHEN YOUR MATE IS COMPLETE THE UNIVERSE WILL SHIP THEM OUT SPECIAL DELIVERY, WITH A BOW. WHEN YOU MEET THEM YOU'LL KNOW! YOU DESERVE THE BEST. SINCERELY, #FRIENDINYOURPOCKETQwana ReynoldsFrasier
37
STAY THE COURSE BY FORCE!Qwana ReynoldsFrasier
38
MIND YOUR OWN SOCIAL MEDIA BUSINESSQwana ReynoldsFrasier
39
TO LIVE A LIFE VOID OF NEED ISA LIFE FILLED WITH DEPRIVATIONQwana ReynoldsFrasier
40
WRITE YOURSELF OUT OF THE WRONG PLACE! WRITING IS SPIRITUAL THERAPYâœ#HOPENATIONQwana ReynoldsFrasier
41
Isn’t it better just to make your own money, and then spend it how and when you want, and with dignity?Zack Love
42
THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape. When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man. She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street.For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit. She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.Brandi L. Bates
43
Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87Mona Rodriguez
44
Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).Mona Rodriguez
45
Why are you perpetuating a childhood you grew up despising? Pg 57Mona Rodriguez
46
Dating someone exclusively for four months in New York is like four years in Anchorage.Zack Love
47
Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook. .Shannon L. Alder
48
From New Delhi to New York, from Durban to Rio; women andgirls are been hunted down by rapists, abused by pedophiles andemotionally decapitated by a society that is becoming increasinglyhostile to the womenfolkOche Otorkpa
49
Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.T.A
50
His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.Jami Attenberg
51
One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong.Mindy Kaling
52
The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one’s head.Pat R
53
To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.Unknown
54
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.F. Scott Fitzgerald
55
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.Jean Baudrillard
56
I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.Ken Wheaton
57
I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)Barbara Blatner
58
Oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)Barbara Blatner
59
...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)Barbara Blatner
60
She resents the chipped paint of the table and the dingy closet they call a dressing room. (Dark City Lights)Annette Meyers
61
He imagines the water running in thick curving lines, like the drawings of the tree’s roots, cutting through stone and spilling over the earth. And then he reverses the flow of water, letting his imagination take over, and he sees the water racing north, uphill, towards the Catskills, weaving around towns, beneath bridges, rushing over stones and cutting through the trees, until it lands at the feet of Alice Pearson, who stands on the shore, looking out at the place where the water meets the sky.Beth Hahn
62
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
63
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
64
New York is more than a state of mind. It is the completion of a dream. ( "New York at arm's length of desire" )Erik Pevernagie
65
The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away? .Michael Thomas Ford
66
Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system–right here–through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow.Tom Wolfe
67
As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything - pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery.E.L. Doctrow
68
As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything - pleasure, gaud display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery.E.L. Doctrow
69
A city full of eight million people. It was all rather lonely sometimes.Kelly Moran
70
I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights)Jerrold Mundis
71
Ephraim found a stack of postcards tied together with a faded green ribbon. He shuffled through them and found they were from every World's Fair from 1915 in San Francisco to 1939 in New York. None of the postcards hed been written on or mailed.Megan Frazer Blakemore
72
I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.Sylvia Plath
73
Isolation was the final blow. Scattering their unity like a body chopped into seven. Life cannot prevail in each piece; it can only survive as one. With every new grenade that the Institute lobbed, the body of hope died a little bit more.S.W. Lothian
74
The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb. It gives a slap to the laundry stretched on lines between tenements, over dirty, broken streets where, even at this hour, hungry children scour the bins for food. The wind has existed forever. It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed. It has played mute witness to its burning witches, and has walked along a Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their human cargo, blinking and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose.Libba Bray
75
Every day in New York City is a test. Work hard and pass this test, you get a chocolate cookie. From a strange man on the subway. A man without pants.Christy Hall
76
New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night.Gillian Flynn
77
They were learning that New York had another life, too – subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city – a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.Malcolm Cowley
78
New York had pushed and bent and bullied, driving me underground to sort out the madness and sculpt my Being with my own hands in self-discovery on its cold pottery wheel and in the white heat of its kiln. The City enabled me to learn who I really was, as a pixelated man and member of Humanity.David B. Lentz
79
Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce, " the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.Abraham Verghese
80
So I still like to see you, my friend. I still like to sit in La Côte Basque and sip wine and eat fine food and indulge in our memories–the good ones, the ones we want to remember. So let’s do that. That’s the story we can tell ourselves, at night when we can’t sleep. We can tell ourselves that there is one other person in the world who sees it in the same way, who remembers. Who remembers her. Babe. And Gloria. And even Truman, I guess, as he was, back then. Our fun, gossipy friend. Our entrée into a different world, for a time. An amusing, brief little time. A time before it was fashionable to tell the truth, and the world grew sordid from too much honesty. .Melanie Benjamin
81
So many lights you’d think we were living in a constellationJodi Lynn Anderson
82
A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)Jonathan Santlofer
83
I don't hate it here, " she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she'd been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. "It's just that I don't belong here." He gave her a meloncholy smile. "If it's any consolation, when I was growing up, I didn't feel like I belonged here, either. I dreamed about going to New York. But it's strange, because when I finally escaped this place, I ended up missing it more than I thought I would. There's something about the ocean that just calls to me. .Nicholas Sparks
84
The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.Olivia Sudjic
85
Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America–but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded–if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River–he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love. .Jacob M. Appel
86
Then, one sunny September morning, the illusion of a personal God that I tried so hard to believe in, exploded over the skies of Manhattan. Even as the ashes and ruin of this horrific act of blind faith settled over New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, I watched people across the country scrambling to that same irrational altar for their answers. In the fierce storm of emotion that rolled across this country, one realization rose to the surface of my mind with blinding clarity: certainly this mechanism of unassailable blind faith is one of the greatest risks mankind faces today.Nathan Phelps
87
Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three laters -- the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup or old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.Emma Straub
88
It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy -for any of its millions- to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.Moss Hart
89
Only criminals and madmen walk into Central Park after midnight...or, occasionally, an actor. (Dark City Lights)Jane Dentinger
90
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
91
When I had to work Shea Stadium for a Mets-Braves game — Atlanta pitcher John Rocker had recently given an interview in which he denounced New Yorkers of all Colors and preferences — I was assigned to a parking lot, where numerous drivers asked me for directions to various highways. When my first answer — “I have no idea” — seemed to invite denunciation and debate, I revised it to “Take the first left.” For all I know, those people are still lost in Queens.Edward Conlon
92
Moonlight does things to a street scene that no other natural or man-made phenomenon can effect. People walk slower, their smiles lingering on contended faces. Horses that usually move along fast enough to stir up the dust off the street plod lazily in the clear, cool night. And in dark corners where people forget to look, the goons come out.Bailey Bristol
93
This women's orchestra made a demure picture in their muted dove grays, alright, but they played like they were gowned in scarlet and gold.Bailey Bristol
94
She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free to travel under the name of Maria Brooks must have misled him.Unknown
95
Next time -- we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren!Leonard Leventon
96
Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering - our civil war, if you will - I have solicited your aid.Leonard Leventon
97
There is a little bit of everybody in everybody.Leonard Leventon
98
I once believed soft, warm, beautiful things could never flourish in an environment of hard concrete and cold, dark bricks.Tom Winton
99
It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth. .Siri Hustvedt
100
Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn't have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity in New York, twice (the second one wanted to believe he was the first so badly). I had my mind blown open by the combination of a liberal arts education and a drug-popping international crowd. I became tough. I had fun. I learned so much. But now New York was starting to feel empty, a great party that had gone on too long and was showing no sign of ending soon. I had a headache, and I was tired. I'd danced enough. I wanted a quiet conversation with someone who knew what load-shedding was.Mohsin Hamid