“I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.”
Rick Riordan
“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window – no, I don’t feel how small I am – but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
John Updike
“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
Tom Wolfe
“New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous.
But there is one thing about it – once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.”
John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
“Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don’t have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That’s why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car.”
George Carlin, Brain Droppings
One July 4, 198-something, when I was in the Air Force and still believed what I did had meaning, I was on my way home from a three week trip in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Our pilot asked requested 10,000 feet over the Statue of Liberty and, because I was savvy and pals with the radio operator onboard, I knew he’d been approved, since we were an Air Force crew returned with an E-3B military jet on Independence Day. An hour off shore, I walked into the flight deck and asked the pilot if I could sit in “seat 5” (additional seat in flight deck for occupation during landing/takeoff/air refueling simply to watch the sky around the jet for birds or other airborne dangers). He said it was all mine as long as I could hold it. Well, by the time the rest of the crew realized where we were crossing into U.S. airspace, it was too late and more than a dozen heads poked into the flight deck and saw that they’d been out-maneuvered (again) by Maggie.
It is the only time I’ve seen New York by day. I’ve flown over it at night, but never had I been that close and seen and grasped the enormity of it. The awe that I felt at the capability of man to build and live in such a sprawling mass of concrete, brick, and asphalt was not even equaled when I first viewed the Grand Canyon from its edge.
I would be completely lost there and I know it. Is best I stay here on my 40 acres and look at the sky.