“Books entered my house under cover of night

“Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed”
― Luc Sante

“Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.”
― Luc Sante

“I realize that books are not the entire world, even if they sometimes seem
to contain it. But I need the stupid things.”
― Luc Sante

“The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.”
― Luc Sante

“I wasn't born in New York and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.”
― Luc Sante

“Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The map is altered and time is telescoped. Daylight restores things to their normal condition, or is that really their normal condition? The map of the city wrinkles and unfolds, wrinkles and unfolds.”
― Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

“We thought of [New York] as a free city, like one of those storied prewar tropical nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions.”
― Luc Sante, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005

“The speed of change was ruthless, but it was more a promise than a threat.”
― Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

“A lot of my favourite American writers are from the 1930s to the 60s. James Agee, Joseph Mitchell, AJ Liebling, Meyer Berger: they relied on their intuitions, didn’t follow any who-what-where rules of reporting, frequently portrayed a contrary viewpoint. They all over-identified with their subjects. There’s never the slightest pretense of objectivity.”
― Luc Sante

“...for years the first of May was the day all leases expired, and on that day mass migrations would take place, with families lugging eiderdowns and ancestral portraits through the streets, as if in parody of the march of the wagon trains.”
― Luc Sante

“Owing to the turning of streets and to the way edifices seem to abruptly block passage while artfully concealing narrow channels that wind around them, so that the pedestrian changes course without really thinking about it...the zone, according to Debord, "inclined toward atheism, oblivion, and the disorientation of habitual reflexes.”
― Luc Sante