48p.
...But she knew better than to wear them into a place like this—where one had nothing to gain from formality and everything to lose by comparison. - P-1
63p.
..It wasn‘t about who had dibs now or who was sitting next to whom in the cinema. The game had changed; or rather, it wasn‘t a game at all anymore. It was a matter of making it through the night, which is often harder than it sounds, and always a very individual business. - P-1
117~118p.
...How little imagination and courage we show in our hatreds. If we earn fifty cents an hour, we admire the rich and pity the poor, and we reserve the full force of our venom for those who make a penny more or a penny less. That‘s why there isn‘t a revolution every ten years.... - P-1
128p.
..Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one‘s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements. - P-1
133p.
..It was a cute answer. At least, that‘s what I thought at the time. But on cooler reflection, it struck me that when you‘re asked your favorite day of the year, there‘s a certain hubris in giving any day in June as your answer. It suggests that the particulars of your life are so terrific, and your command over your station so secure, that all you could possibly hope for is additional daylight in which to celebrate your lot. But as the Greeks teach us, there is only one remedy for that sort of hubris. They called it nemesis. We call it getting what you deserve, or a finger in the eye, or comeuppance for short.... - P-1
169p.
...Where for so many, New York was ultimately the sum of what they would never attain, for this crew New York was a city where the improbable would be made probable, the implausible plausible and the impossible possible. So if you wanted to keep your head on straight, you had to be willing to establish a little distance, now and then. - P-1
206p.
..Written by a Belarusian immigrant named Vernon Duke, "Autumnin New York" practically debuted as a jazz standard. Within fifteen years of its first being played, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughn, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald had all explored its sentimental bounds. Within twenty-five, there would be interpretations of the interpretations by Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Frank Sinatra, Bud Powell, and Oscar Peterson. The very question that the song asks of us about autumn, we could ask ourselves of the song: Why does it seem so inviting?
..Presumably, one factor is that each city has its own romantic season. Once a year, a city‘s architectural, cultural, and horticultural variables come into alignment with the solar course in such a way that men and women passing each other on the thoroughfares feel an unusual sense of romantic promise. Like Christmastime in Vienna, or April in Paris. - P-1
218p.
...When a mother loses a daughter, she grieves over the future that her daughter will never have, but she can take solace in memories of close-knit days. But when your daughter runs away, it is the fond memories that have been laid to rest; and your daughter‘s future, alive and well, recedes from you like a wave drawing out to sea. - P-1
260p.
..As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion—whether they‘re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment—if the next thing you‘re going to say makes you feel better, then it‘s probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I‘ve discovered in life. And you can have it, since it‘s been of no use to me. - P-1
262p.
...I suppose we don‘t rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment—a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime. - P-1
297p.
..Could there have been a more contrary statue to place across from one of the largest cathedrals in America? Atlas, who attempted to overthrow the gods on Olympus and was thus condemned to shoulder the celestial spheres for all eternity—the very personification of hubris and brute endurance. While back in the shadows of St. Patrick‘s was the statue‘s physical and spiritual antithesis, the Pietà—in which our Savior, having already sacrificed himself to God‘s will, is represented broken, emaciated, laid out on Mary‘s lap.
..Here they resided, two worldviews separated only by Fifth Avenue, facing off until the end of time or the end of Manhattan, whichever came first. - P-1
302p.
..He came through the door with two pounds of coal wrapped in newspaper. He got down on his knees in front of the stove and set about lighting the fire, blowing on the flames like a scout.
..He always looked his best, I thought to myself, when circumstances called for him to be a boy and a man at the same time. - P-1
323p.
..In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come. - P-1
324p.
..I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubt that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss. - P-1
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