The City We Became

People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.

He pretends to be less special than he is, because the world has punished him for loving himself.

This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.

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

Nothing human beings do is set in stone--and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to. People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.

Real gods aren’t what most of you Christians think of as gods. Gods are people. Sometimes dead people, sometimes still alive. Sometimes never lived.” She shrugs. “They do jobs—bring fortune, look after people, make sure the world works as it should. They fall in love. Have babies. Fight. Die.” She shrugs. “It’s duty. It’s normal. Get over it.

And just to add insult to injury? I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed.

Home isn't where the heart is; it's wherever the wind feels right.

Back when Aislyn was a teenager, she often thought of her mother as dull. Since then Aislyn has come to understand that women sometimes have to pretend to be dull so that the men around them can feel sharper.

Only the bodegas stand open, sentinels of The City That Never Sleeps And Occasionally Needs Milk At Two A.M.

I don’t know where old girl found a bikini that big, but she’s got maximum Don’t Give A Fuck mode engaged, and I’m surfing on her bitch wave.

He’s been here one hour, but already he feels like he has never lived anywhere else. And even if he doesn’t know who he was… he knows who he is.

It was important, they'd told her, to know where her food came from, and to understand that not just one, but many deaths had enabled her survival. Therefore it was crucial that she use every part of the animal, as much as she could, and take no more than she needed. To kill under those circumstances, or to survive, was respectful. To kill for any other reason was monstrous.

these people are always gonna tell themselves that a little fascism is okay as long as they can still get unlimited drinks with brunch!

But then you meet somebody fine at the neighborhood block party, or you go out for Vietnamese perogies or some other bizarre shit that you can't get anywhere but in this dumb-ass city, or you go see an off-off-off-Broadway fringe festival that nobody else has seen, or you have a random encounter on the subway that becomes something so special and beautiful that you'll tell your grandkids about it someday.

Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.

she had a gentle soul wrapped in razor wire, but the sharp edges are not her fault. The world trained her to violence, to ferocity, because it hates so much of what she is.

Skippy the tentacle monster sends her little bigot fuckbois to harass you on the internet? Like, is that how Lovecraftian horror works now, because… I can’t…

So, here’s the thing,” she tells them. “All of that stuff is true. All the other worlds that human beings believe in, via group myths or spiritual visitations or even imaginations if they’re vivid enough, they exist. Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there. That’s the great secret of existence: it’s supersensitive to thought. Decisions, wishes, lies—that’s all you need to create a new universe. Every human being on this planet spins off thousands between birth and death, although there’s something about the way our minds work that keeps us from noticing. In every moment, we’re constantly moving in multiple dimensions—we think we’re sitting still, but we’re actually falling from one universe to the next to the next, so fast that it all blends together, like… like animation. Except there’s a lot more than just images flipping past.

I don’t have to believe in something for it to fuck up my life.

You're very optimistic for a possible serial killer. I like that about you.

The world can't hurt you if you just ignore everything that's wrong with it. Well, not until it kills you anyway.

Money talks and bullshit walks in New York. In a lot of cities, probably—but here, the nation’s shrine to unrestricted predatory capitalism, money has nearly talismanic power. Which means that he can use it as a talisman.

Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son, and don’t fucking bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here.

What we are, what we’re made of, is many worlds coming together. Reality and legends. This world where we’re just people, and that world, where we can be miles-wide cities that just happen to be sitting a couple of feet across from each other because the laws of space, physics, don’t work the same way.

And here in this other realm she looms over him, vast and sprawling, wildly patchwork and dense. Not just older and bigger. Stronger in many ways: her arms and core are thick with muscled neighborhoods that each have their own rhythms and reputations. Williamsburg, Hasidim enclave and artist haven turned hipster ground zero. Bed Stuy (do or die). Crown Heights, where now the only riots are over seats at brunch. Her jaw is tight with the stubborn ferocity of Brighton Beach's old mobsters and the Rockaways' working-class holdouts against the brutal inevitability of rising seas. But there are spires at Brooklyn's heart, too- perhaps not as grand as his own, and maybe some of hers are actually the airy, fanciful amusement-park towers of Coney Island- but all are just as shining, just as sharp.

Innocence is nothing but a ceremony, after all. So strange that you people venerate it the way you do. What other world celebrates not knowing anything about how life really works?