Sari Botton > Quotes

“The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then—revealing—just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“Leaving home does something to your sense of identity. Either you become more of that place than you ever were while you lived there, or your identity calcifies around the rejection of this place. It is challenging to inhabit the space between these two positions.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“And I discovered this was the best thing about New York: you could run away every day if you wanted to and still find yourself in a newly incarnated version of the city.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“New York is the place I am from, even though I was never from there to begin with.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“always that feeling when you walk out the door and onto the street in New York that today, no matter what happened yesterday, you can begin again.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“People often mistake New Yorkers for rude and mean, but they’re really just no-nonsense and efficient. They don’t have time, regularly, to be warm and friendly with everyone who crosses their path. Nothing would ever get done. But when the chips are down, when it matters, they drop their cool exteriors and become unabashedly human.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“The city was haunted in a way I hated and cherished at the same time.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“Sure, I might leave the city someday, the same way I might become an astronaut or a lion tamer.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“Change is seen as something evil only by those who have lost their youth or sense of humor.” That was Cookie Mueller on the East Village, 1985. The”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“Here are some of the things I learned while living in New York: That you shouldn’t interpret direct and efficient communication as rudeness. That a sidewalk operates by the same rules as a highway: if you walk slow, walk in the right lane, and if you have to stop, pull over. I learned that once the late June sunshine hits the streets, pretty girls in summer dresses come out of the woodwork. I also learned that summer brings with it the inescapable smell of marinating garbage and human urine. In the city, you can get weed delivered to your front door by a hipster on a bicycle or pick up a screwdriver in the dead of the night at a twenty-four-hour hardware store. I learned that the city has resilience like no other city during natural (or man-made) disasters, and that the people of New York generally coexist peacefully, which is impressive, considering there are 27,352 people per square mile.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“When you tell people you’re going to leave New York, they like to tell you, “New York will always be here.” But it won’t always be there. My insides ache when I think, “I will never be twenty again and moving to Williamsburg with the sun on my face.” So I don’t let myself think it.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“New York City gave me everything it had, and greedy as I was for experience, I took and took. I carry with me every day the gift of the lessons New York taught me.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“I know one of the secrets the rest of the country hasn’t figured out yet: it’s not New Yorkers who are rude, it’s the tourists who’ve seen a movie about rude New Yorkers and think they have to act the same way when they come to New York who are rude.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“Leaving things you love is easier when you’re younger. You make stupid decisions about the wrong people. You slam the apartment door, throw your lover’s clothes out the window onto the sidewalk. Leaving gets harder as you age. You don’t leave out of anger or from coming to your senses, but because your love is not as strong as your reasons for going.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“I was terrified by the prospect of mediocrity in myself or my surroundings, and whatever happened, whatever I did, if it happened in New York, my thinking went, it would not be mediocre.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“People who don’t love the city talk about the freedom of the country and its wide open spaces; they marvel at how one could live in so cramped and crowded a space. But I always felt free in Brooklyn. I found safety in its enclosures. The city let me relax into being myself. Being who I am in New York didn’t feel like an action I took—it just felt like living.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“Kvetching means complaining, and complaining is really what will forever keep New York the city it is.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“I have not been completely happy anywhere. At least not yet.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“Wherever I am is the beginning of an adventure.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“I left New York because I wanted more. I wanted space and silence, mountains and sky—the calm to appreciate my life, a life that, I now knew, had already begun and didn’t need to “get started.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“And then there are the subway readers of difficult books. I like to imagine that New Yorkers are more literate than the riders of other American metropolises.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“For most of the time I lived there, I was relatively certain that for better or worse, I’d never leave, even in low moments when staying felt like a marriage of convenience, the positives just barely outweighing the negatives. But then the equation shifted, and it began to seem as if, consistently, the city demanded more from me than it offered in return.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“But honestly, for the last two years that I lived in New York, I went to very few movies. I had a baby. I was laid off. I could not afford child care to go to the movies. Irrationally, I did not want child care. I wanted to take care of my daughter. I was in love with her, Nina, a burning crazy passionate love. My life in New York City pretty much fell apart after she was born.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“The subways, to my eyes, are a godsend: efficient, they get me where I want to go pretty quickly, they provide entertainment, sometimes via musicians who perform at station platforms, sometimes through the singing panhandlers who traipse through the cars, and most important, they are a stay against solipsism, proof positive that I am not alone in the universe.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“I had imagined my dreams coming true, but not what happened after that.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“No single city truly affects a person like New York does. It’s one of those undisputed truths the world over; you either hate it for your own reasons, or you can’t ever shake the feeling of being there.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“I watched the night mostly from my window, sitting on the radiator, with the growing awareness that as much as I loved New York, we just weren’t right for each other anymore. We needed time apart, and because New York would never be the one to reject me, I knew I had to be the one to end things, at least for now. I’d loved New York so faithfully for so many years but I needed something else.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York

“I used to think that every eventful thing that happened in my life would feel as good as moving to New York City did, that my life would be like moving to New York, over and over and over again. I know now that as with falling in love, you’re lucky if it happens to you even once.”
― Sari Botton, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

“I told myself I was tired of New York, but I was tired of the story I lived there. I wasn’t tired of New York.”
― Sari Botton, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York