From E.B. White's "Here is New York"

-The residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending on a good deal of luck. No one should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky.

-New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.

-There are roughly three New Yorks: the first is the New York of a man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter – the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is last – the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s highest-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

-Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow. This, more than anything, is responsible for its physical majesty.

-Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit – a sort of perpetual muddling through.

-New York, the capital of memoranda, in touch with Calcutta, in touch with Reykjavik, and always fooling with something.

-The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity…If people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite.