65 Quotes About Manhattan

  • Author Giles Milton
  • Quote

    Juet's journal frequently records how only a tiny quantity of alcohol was needed to get the Indians drunk, 'for they could not take it'; and tales of the drunkenness that greeted Hudsons' arrival persisted among the native Indians until the last century. Indeed Heckewelder claims that the name Manhattan is derived from the drunkenness that took place there, since the Indian word 'manahactanienk' means 'the island of general intoxication'.

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  • Author Amor Towles
  • Quote

    Sitting in the jazz bars or the supper clubs, the worn and the well-to-do would be nodding their heads in smiling acknowledgement that the Belarusian immigrant had it right: that somehow, despite the coming of winter, autumn in New York promises an effervescent romance which makes one look to the Manhattan skyline with fresh eyes and feel: It's good to live it again.

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  • Author A.D. Aliwat
  • Quote

    The poor Indians that sold the isle of Manhattan for twenty-four bucks are the only real native New Yorkers.

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  • Author Ben Lerner
  • Quote

    I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers.

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  • Author Marisha Pessl
  • Quote

    Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren’t immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.

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  • Author Joe Schreiber
  • Quote

    It was a spectral Manhattan, a double-exposed landscape where the past folded back over on itself in overlapping decades.

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