New York in Quotations

“Make your mark in New York and you are a made man,” wrote Mark Twain, encapsulating both the naked ambition of the city’s citizens and the opportunities up for grabs in the Big Apple. Others take a more cynical approach, calling the city “an aviary overstocked with jays” (O. Henry), a “sucked orange” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), or “fantastically charmless and elaborately dire” (Henry James). Over the last three-and-a-half centuries, this glamorous, twenty-four hour city has attracted a multitude of thinkers, poets, novelists and playwrights, many of whom have brilliantly encapsulated its unique spirit through verse, prose, or the ultimate wisecrack.