It is a primitive darkness. It has always been here, after all the city lights have gone out, carrying its own time with the sun.

It made me wistful for the illusion of New York more than for its actuality, after having lived there for five years.

The only way to metabolize anger is to direct your focus to things at hand. Like my breath, which comes out in fogs. Like the whirring of the space heater, its thin heat disappearing out the cell as soon as it is made.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you

I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself. But toward the end, in those weeks of walking and taking pictures, I came to know and love the thing itself. This was partly because I loved the work of documenting it. Even

The feeling of walking into a mall before you’ve spent any money, the sense of promise that always diminishes gradually, as you go into the same stores, looking at the same merchandise. You are not accumulating new knowledge. You are remembering, even though you have not set foot in a mall since you were a teenager.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?