City That Never Sleeps Quotes

missions. A moment later she heard the sound of the television start up. The clever little thing had worked out how to use the remote control. 'Not till August,' said Lauren. 'We've got lots to sort out. Visas and so on. We'll have to find an apartment, a nanny for Jacob.' A nanny for Jacob. 'Job for me.' Rob sounded a little nervous. 'Oh, yes, darling,' said Rachel. She did try to take her son seriously. She really did. 'A job for you. In real estate, do you think?' 'Not sure yet,' said Rob. 'We'll have to see. I might end up being a house husband.' 'So sorry I never taught him how to cook,' said Rachel to Lauren, not especially sorry. Rachel had never been much interested in cooking or that good at it; it was just another chore that had to be done, like the laundry. The way people went on these days about cooking. 'That's okay,' beamed Lauren. 'We'll probably eat out a lot in New York. The city that never sleeps, ~ Liane Moriarty

I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I'd never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way. ~ Jenny Lawson

You want to go somewhere?' he asked.
'Like now? its late.'
'isn't las vegas the city that never sleeps?'
'i think that's new york.'
'right. this is sin city. ~ Olivia Cunning

LA is very different from New York. New York is a huge, dense metropolis. LA is a bunch of small towns all running into each other.

New York is the city that never sleeps. Los Angeles is an endless sea of suburbs. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life. ~ Bao Shu

[On Las Vegas:] ... The City That Never Sleeps. The City That Sins and Smiles and Lives On the Edge. The city where vices become virtues, become what everyone is here to do. ~ Karen Kijewski

when we're done, I'll be where the night never stops
cradling a bruise that's shaped like you
wondering why sleep never came to me
wondering how I still dreamed ~ Alicen Grey

I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps ~ Frank Sinatra

Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread. ~ N.K. Jemisin

Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. M ~ Nora Ephron

Four A.M.
When the city that never sleeps at least lies down and closes its eyes. ~ Don Winslow, "The Force"

Like the United Nations, there is something inspirational about New York as a great melting pot of different cultures and traditions. And if this is the city that never sleeps, the United Nations works tirelessly, around the clock around the world. ~ Ban Ki-moon

L.A., it's nice, but I think of sunshine and people on rollerblades eating sushi. New York, I think of nighttime, I think of Times Square and Broadway and nightlife and the city that never sleeps. ~ Jimmy Fallon

It is not Beauty I demand,
A crystal brow, the moon's despair,
Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand,
Nor mermaid's yellow pride of hair.

Tell me not of your starry eyes,
Your lips that seem on roses fed,
Your breasts where Cupid trembling lies,
Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed.

...Give me, instead of beauty's bust,
A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I could trust,
Yet never linked with error find.

One in whose gentle bosom I
Could pour my secret heart of woes.
Like the care-burdened honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose.

My earthly comforter! whose love
So indefeasible might be,
That when my spirit won above
Hers could not stay for sympathy. ~ George Darley

It isn't about the welfare check. It never was.
It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.
In Baltimore, a city with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation. ~ David Simon

A Party for New Year (for Lily and Maisie, the ladies what lunch.)

Dear Lily,
I have bought something frilly,
to wear on New Year's Eve.
You may think it sounds rather silly,
and, what I tell you, you will never believe.

I met a woman in Primark, I know,
not my normal shop.
Just heard so much about it
inside I had to pop.

Well, the top I purchased, sparkles.
The frills upon it abound.
This woman I met in the changing room.
On me, she said it looked sound.

It's very, very silver you know.
A little bit like Lametta.
Oh Lily, I feel quite aglow.
On no one could it look any better.

Dear Maisie,
Things are looking a bit hazy.
A silver top, for New Year.
Are you really, really that crazy?
My word, you batty old dear.

I'm wearing my old faithful.
The black dress, with the gold trim.
It's not like we're doing anything special.
In fact proceedings sound quite grim.

Sitting on your old sofa
With a Baileys, if I'm lucky.
Watching the same old things on the box.
I'm not excited Ducky.

I want to be in the city
and feel the atmosphere.
It really is a pity
that you want to stay right here.

Dear Lily.
Now you are being silly.
What about your knees?
Standing about, feeling chilly,
and moaning you're going to freeze.

Much better to stay ~ Ann Perry

I've become a handmaiden to other people's relationships. Aiding and abetting. And now I'm al alone. Thank God for Miranda. I'll always have her. Miranda will never have a relationship. So where the hell is she?

"Having sex," she repeats. She slides onto the cushion. "I met a guy and we've been having nonstop sex for the last two days. And the worst thing about it? I couldn't poop. I honestly could not poop until he finally left this morning."

"He's not the best-looking guy. But I told myself that looks aren't everything. And he really is smart. Which can be a turn-on. I've always said I'd rather be with a smart, ugly guy than a goodlooking dumb guy. Because what are you going to talk about with a dumb guy?"

"So then," Miranda continues, "we're walking through the Mews -- that cute little cobblestoned street -- and suddenly he pushes me up against the wall and starts making out with me!"

"I hardly know him," she giggles, "but so what? If it's right, it's right, don't you think? ~ Candace Bushnell

Built up by the middle classes to hold their own against royalty, sanctioning, and, at the same time strengthening, their sway over the workers, parliamentary rule is pre-eminently a middle-class rule. The upholders of this system have never seriously maintained that a parliament or a municipal council represent a nation or a city. The most intelligent among them know that this is impossible. The middle classes have simply used the parliamentary system to raise a protecting barrier against the pretensions of royalty, without giving the people liberty. But gradually, as the people become conscious of their real interests, and the variety of their interests is growing, the system can no longer work. Therefore democrats of all countries vainly imagine various palliatives. The Referendum is tried and found to be a failure; proportional representation is spoken of, the representation of minorities, and other parliamentary Utopias. In a word, they strive to find what is not to be found, and after each new experiment they are bound to recognize that it was a failure; so that confidence in Representative Government vanishes more and more. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that's lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won't be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival. ~ Jay McInerney

ANTHONY:
I feel you, Johanna, I feel you
Do they think that walls can hide you?
Even now I'm at your window
I am in the dark beside you,
Buried sweetly in your yellow hair, Johanna…

SWEENEY TODD:
And are you beautiful and pale,
With yellow hair, like her
I'd want you beautiful and pale,
The way I've dreamed you were, Johanna...

ANTHONY:
Johanna...

SWEENEY TODD:
And if you're beautiful, what then,
With yellow hair, like wheat?
I think we shall not meet again -
My little dove, my sweet Johanna…

ANTHONY:
I'll steal you, Johanna…

SWEENEY TODD:
Goodbye, Johanna.
You're gone, and yet you're mine.
I'm fine, Johanna, I'm fine!

ANTHONY:
Johanna…

BEGGAR WOMAN:
Smoke! Smoke! Sign of the devil! Sign of the devil!
City on fire!
Witch! Witch! Smell it, sir! An evil smell!
Every night at the vespers bell -
Smoke that comes from the mouth of hell -
City on fire! City on fire!
Mischief! Mischief! Mischief...

SWEENEY TODD:
And if I never hear your voice,
My turtledove, my dear,
I still have reason to rejoice:
The way ahead is clear, Johanna...

JOHANNA:
I'll marry Anthony Sunday
Anthony…Sunday…

ANTHONY:
I feel you…

SWEENEY TODD:
And in that darkness when I'm blind
With what I can't forget -
~ Stephen Sondheim

I have never been to a court s gracious as the one Neha keeps. Dmitri played a knife through his fingers, one of the three he'd brought back from Neha's territory. "She truly believes in giving honor to a visitor." He threw to knife at Jason.
"He threw it back as Venom added, "Thought she might have that guest neatly executed as the court sleeps. ~ Nalini Singh

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore. ~ Tablo

And second, keep in mind that you are a weapon. In theory, when you're done with training, you should be able to kick a hole in a wall or knock out a moose with a single punch."
"I would never hit a moose," said Clary. "They're endangered. ~ Cassandra Clare

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn.
Oh, Mary Lou.
My baby.
My love. ~ Pete Hamill

I found Toronto an immensely likeable city, spacious and gentle and slightly dignified, but in a low-key, friendly way. The only people who didn't seem to think much of it were its inhabitants, who could hardly wait for you to ask directions, because that gave them the perfect opportunity to apologise for it. What they were apologising for I never understood. I think they felt uninteresting, compared with America. I took the opposite view; I remember reading about the doctrine of American "Exceptionalism" and thinking that what I liked so much about Canadians was that they consider themselves unexceptional. This modest, unthreatening attitude seems to produce a nation that is stable, safe, decent and well respected. It's just a shame that for seven months of the year it's so cold that only Canadians would put up with it. ~ John Cleese

It was the Die Trying promotion tour, and I wasn't mugged. In fact, I mugged the other guy. Promotion tours are hard work, but the compensation is freebie visits to places you might not otherwise go, so I always make a habit, when the day is done, of taking a stroll, usually about midnight. I was in San Francisco, so figured I'd go look at the Tenderloin part of town, which is rough. This guy stepped out and basically said, "Give me your money." ... I was amazed how quickly I snapped back through almost 40 years and suddenly became that tough city kid again. I got right in the guy's face and told him he had to give me his money or I'd break his arms. Just a purely instinctive reaction from long ago. Never back down. Never show fear. He only had five bucks. I gave it to the next homeless person I saw. ~ Lee Child

When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage"
"Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time," she said. ~ K.J. Bishop

I'm Magnus." He smiled, showing blinding white teeth.
"Magnus Bane."
"Are we long-lost friends, by any chance?" Simon said.
"Just wondering."
"No, we never got along all that well," said Magnus.
"Long-lost acquaintances? Compadres? My cat liked you. ~ Cassandra Clare

But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, clad in complete armor; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could not conquer. We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves. Let us remember that he was a soldier
not a policeman
and so, praise him. Being a soldier, he staid,
because the warrior instinct forbade him to fly. Had he been a policeman he would have staid, also
because he would have been asleep. ~ Mark Twain

I want things to change in The Nameless City. I want the people in the city to finally have some influence over its future. We've never had that before. If there's something I can do to make this council of nations happen, I want to know about it. Don't tell me not to be worried. Tell me how to help. ~ Faith Erin Hicks

You never called me back," he said. "I called you so many times and you never called me back."
Magnus looked at Alec as if he'd lost his mind. "Your city is under attack," he said. "The wards have been broken, and the streets are full of demons. And you want to know why I haven't called you?"
Alec set his jaw in a stubborn line. "I want to know why you haven't called me back."
Magnus threw his hands up in the air in a gesture of utter exasperation. Alec noted with interest that when he did it, a few sparks escaped from his fingertips, like fireflies escaping from a jar. "You're an idiot."
"Is that why you haven't called me? Because I'm an idiot?"
"No." Magnus strode toward him. "I didn't call you because I'm tired of you only wanting me around when you need something. I'm tired of watching you be in love with someone else - someone, incidentally, who will never love you back. Not the way I do."
"You love me?"
"You stupid Nephilim," Magnus said patiently. "Why else am I here? Why else would I have spent the past few weeks patching up all your moronic friends every time they got hurt? And getting you out of every ridiculous situation you found yourself in? Not to mention helping you win a battle against Valentine. And all completely free of charge! ~ Cassandra Clare

There was something in the way he posed a question and followed it up with a generous pause, I think, that drew me out. I had never noticed all the pauses that were missing from most people's conversations. ~ Suzanne Rindell

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticiously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functional social order, The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. ~ James C. Scott

Sometimes Marlboro Man and I would venture out into the world--go to the city, see a movie, eat a good meal, be among other humans. But what we did best was stay in together, cooking dinner and washing dishes and retiring to the chairs on his front porch or the couch in his living room, watching action movies and finding new and inventive ways to wrap ourselves in each other's arms so not a centimeter of space existed between us. It was our hobby. And we were good at it.
It was getting more serious. We were getting closer. Each passing day brought deeper feelings, more intense passion, love like I'd never known it before. To be with a man who, despite his obvious masculinity, wasn't at all afraid to reveal his soft, affectionate side, who had no fears or hang-ups about declaring his feelings plainly and often, who, it seemed, had never played a head game in his life…this was the romance I was meant to have.
Occasionally, though, after returning to my house at night, I'd lie awake in my own bed, wrestling with the turn my life had taken. Though my feelings for Marlboro Man were never in question, I sometimes wondered where "all this" would lead. We weren't engaged--it was way too soon for that--but how would that even work, anyway? It's not like I could ever live out here. I tried to squint and see through all the blinding passion I felt and envision what such a life would mean. Gravel? Manure? Overalls? Isolation?
Then, almost without fail, just about the time ~ Ree Drummond

I'm never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that's almost as good as being there yourself. You're in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the further away your friends, and the more spread out they are the better your chances of going safely through the world ... ~ Helen Oyeyemi

In the middle of the room was the bed where he had lain after that bullet found his neck near the Piave River front. It was a stupid attack; they had walked right into it.But Daniel had only enlisted in the war because Lucia was a nurse, so it was just as well. He rubbed at the place where he'd been hit. He could feel the pain almost as if it had happened yesterday.
If Daniel had stuck around long enough to let the wound heal, the doctors would have been amazed by the absence of a scar. Today,his neck was smooth and flawless,as if he had never been shot.
Over the years,Daniel had been beaten, battered, flung over balconies, shot in the neck and the gut and the leg,tortured over hot coals, and dragged through a dozen city streets. But a close study of every inch of his skin would reveal only two small scars: two fine white lines above his shoulder blades where his wings unfurled.
All of the fallen angels acquired these scars when they took their human bodies. In a way,the scars were all any of them had to show for themselves. ~ Lauren Kate

Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it passed.
Right under the city and out into the suburbs and fields these tunnels fed into the river and the network of canals that had fed the industrial revolution. A thousand eyes, some blinded, that had never seen the sun strained in the soiled darkness. It struggled on and it listened with a thousand ears not its own and it cried. ~ Karl P.T. Walsh

Call me infidel, call me atheist, call me what you will, I intend so to treat my children, that they can come to my grave and truthfully say: 'He who sleeps here never gave us a moment of pain. From his lips, now dust, never came to us an unkind word. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

People who worked with me or knew me still called me the 'world's fastest human' because I almost never stopped. I'd found that I could get more done with no regular job or regular hours at all, but by being on my own, flying to speak here, help with a public relations campaign for some client there, tape my regular jazz radio show one morning at 5:00 a.m. before leaving on a plane for another city or another continent three hours later to preside over a major sporting event. ~ Jesse Owens

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed to rejoice as the new flow rushed into our pipes, even as the city warned us this water was kind of special. They said it was okay to drink but don't put it in an aquarium because it would kill the fish.
Drink it we did, then, filled our coffee makers too, and mixed our children's juice concentrate with fluid that would gag a guppy. Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I'm a big believer in winging it. I'm a big believer that you're never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I'm always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary. ~ Anthony Bourdain

There's something about New York City that gives you permission to just be. There's no need for pretense, no need for masks. You can be real, without risk. The buildings are your protectors, the streets are your tethers. The people ... you will never see them again. Even when they're right in front of you, you don't see them. Not really. Just as they don't really see you. New York is beautifully anonymous. ~ Jessica Verdi

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half ... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop ... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen. ~ Mark Twain

The city is full of terrible actors. That is what historians never say about Madras, it is filled with hams. ~ Manu Joseph