New Yorker Quotes

“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in Don’t Shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”
― E. B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.”
― Brendan Gill

“Our grief is not a cry for war.
"That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“He and I had an office so tiny, that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Susan was a tough-minded romantic. She wanted to fall in love with a book. She always had reasons for her devotions, as an astute reader would, but she was, to her credit, probably the most emotional one among us. Susan could fall in love with a book in more or less the way one falls in love with a person. Yes, you can provide, if asked, a list of your loved one’s lovable qualities: he’s kind and funny and smart and generous and he knows the names of trees.

But he’s also more than amalgamation of qualities. You love him, the entirety of him, which can’t be wholly explained by even the most exhaustive explication of his virtues. And you love him no less for his failings. O.K., he’s bad with money, he can be moody sometimes, and he snores. His marvels so outshine the little complaints as to render them ridiculous.”
― Michael Cunningham

“I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . . Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.”
― Elena Ferrante

“I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family”
― David Sedaris

“Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course—arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it’s hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.”
― Tony Kushner

“The paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact.”
― Arthur Miller

“It required an enormous amount of energy and time just to do errands like getting groceries. She was always sweaty after she got groceries.”
― Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise

“Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.”
― Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise

“The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out.”
― Mavis Gallant

“My friend Doris Bry says now that I’ve ruined her spelling because I misspell with such confidence.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe, O'Keeffe

“Frieda was very special,” O’Keeffe recalls. “I can remember very clearly the first time I ever saw her, standing in a doorway, with her hair all frizzed out, wearing a cheap red calico dress that looked as though she’d just wiped out the frying pan with it. She was not thin, and not young, but there was something radiant and wonderful about her.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe, O'Keeffe

“If we accept the unacceptable today, what's the outlook for tomorrow going to be?”
― George Booth

“I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.”
― David Rakoff, Fraud

“We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.”
― Patti Smith

“I never did learn to spell. My friend Doris Bry says now that I’ve ruined her spelling because I misspell with such confidence.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe, O'Keeffe

“Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgement, its absence can diminish memory's truth.”
― Arthur Miller

“What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next.”
― Arthur Miller

“The Wikipedic superficiality and political frivolity with which these grand historical and psychological themes are applied to the gory drama are matched by the appropriation of a few jingling baubles of feminist dialogue meant to get viewers hungry for “substance” to salivate. They’re the product and the fruit of lazy filmmaking. The movie has nothing to say about women’s history, feminist politics, civil violence, the Holocaust, the Cold War, or German culture. Instead, Guadagnino thrusts some thusly labelled trinkets at viewers and suggests that they try to assemble them. The result is sordid, flimsy Holocaust kitsch, fanatical chic, with all the actual political substance of a designer Che T-shirt. When a few riffs of dialogue, midway through the film, speak of a character’s fate in Theresienstadt, one wants to tell the script to get that word out of its mouth.”
― Richard Brody

“আরম্ভের গান
হ্যাঁ তোমাকে অনুমতি দেয়া হল তুমি
যাও হ্যাঁ তুমি জ্যোতির্ময়
গরিমা দেয়া হল হলে
অকাট্য
তুমি যেমন তুমি তেমন দাঁড়িয়ে তোমার মতন
হাঁটো
হ্যাঁ তোমাকে ক্ষমা করা হল তোমাকে
ভালোবাসা হল আর আলিঙ্গন করা হল
হ্যাঁ
তোমাকে বলে হবে
অসাধারণ যেমন ভাবে দাঁড়িয়ে থাকবে আর
সহজ ভাবে বসে থাকবে
হ্যাঁ তুমি আরম্ভ করো
এইভাবে একটা ছোটো পদক্ষেপ এই পদক্ষেপ
দোনামনা বিস্ময়কর যেমন পর্ণ
ফার্ন গাছের বাতাসে
তারপর কোমল আগাছা
আরেক পদক্ষেপ যতোক্ষণ না
শ্যাওলা আর তারপর
হ্যাঁ তুমি ওখানে বৃষ্টিতে দৌড়োচ্ছো
আলোর হাওয়া পাতাগুলো
সবই
মুখগুলো শেষ পর্যন্ত বন্ধুদের ও
হ্যাঁ
হ্যাঁ
তোমায় দেখতে এতো সুন্দর যে তুমি

হাঁটছো যেমন দৌড়োও ওড়ো ভেতরে আসো না
বাতাস পাতাগুলো
জ্যোতির্ময় সূর্য
আর তোমার মুখ ও শোনো
সবই
হ্যাঁ শেষ পর্যন্ত”
― Carol Bergé, Zebras

“This was not the adulthood that I had predicted for myself: an author of books, spending a week in Hawaii with his handsome longtime boyfriend before deciding which house to return to. I had wished for it, sure, but I also wished for a complete head transplant.”
― David Sedaris

“I want to see a bit more of New York, even though it’s snowing and cold.”
― Chetan Bhagat, Half Girlfriend

“Sometimes I get letters from non-Natives who have called me racist and insensitive to Natives untl they realize that I am Native myself. Non-Natives often walk up to me and say, "I didn't get the cartoon today," and I reply, "That's ok, I don't get the cartoons in The New Yorker either.”
― Ricardo Cate, Without Reservations: The Cartoons of Ricardo Cate

“The salesman told Anna that it was pointless to try to rip off his customers, because of everything a Sichuanese person must have gone through in order to accumulate enough money for a Porsche. “The people who are capable of buying luxury cars have exhausted every means to earn profits and they have coped with all kinds of people,” he said. “It’s impossible to deceive them.”
― Peter Hessler

“I knew where the margins were. I could expand a little bit inside them.”
― Bryan Washington

“New York might run on Dow Jones, lattes, dollar signs, and neon lies, but what beats in its breast is it’s people: it’s hip-hop, it’s bodegas, it’s art, it’s Union Square grifters, it’s subway mariachi, it’s two-jobs-and-night-school-thank-you-I’m-fine mothers, it’s daughters full of dreams of making it big, it’s multicolored sons and their hopes blazing bright as a meth tweaker’s eyes.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Dead Take the A Train

“Trump unfurled a giant banner high on the side of his building, directly facing the rival building. "Your views aren't so great, are they? We have the real Central Park views and address. Best Wishes, The Donald." For perhaps the first and only time, the New Yorker printed the words: "Trump has a point.”
― Deirdre Mask, The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power