Quotes About Jersey City

“Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too
a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey
a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing
streets and hot dogs and brusqueness
and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated.”

— Adam Gopnik

“I get the urge to feel it, too, so when she takes her hand away, I turn her toward me and I feel the edges of New Jersey. I kiss Hoboken and Atlantic City. I kiss Newark and Trenton. I kiss Camden, and then I follow the road west, over the Walt Whitman Bridge into Pennsylvania. And I kiss home.”

— A.S. King

“Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War.”

— Philip Roth

“In 1900, as the immigrants come down the gangplank into Jersey City, they expect the streets to be paved with gold, and they were only paved with gold in Frank Baum's 'The Wizard of Oz,' of course.”

— David Levering Lewis

“I lived in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for about 10 years, and then we moved out to Jersey City after my wife and I bought a house up in the Catskills. I miss Brooklyn, but the commute to the Catskills is about 45 minutes shorter.”

— Pablo Schreiber

“I was born in New York City but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey.”

— Eric Maskin

“That got me thinking. Bon Jovi kills in Jersey. Just kills. We did Atlantic City this past winter and man, you wouldn't believe the intensity in that crowd. Can I just talk for a minute about how amazingly hot Heather is?”

— Richie Sambora

“From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.”

— Robert Smithson

“I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-'70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.”

— Feisal Abdul Rauf

“I was actually born in New York City, but my family moved to Atlantic City when I was five, this being my dad's home town, so I think that qualifies me as a Jersey resident if not a bona fide native.”

— Sharon Kay Penman

“I was born in New York City, but I was raised in New Jersey, part of the great Jewish emigration of 1963.”

— Jon Stewart

“When I was growing up in New Jersey, my mom would regularly take my sister and I into the city to see shows. I have many fond memories of standing in the half-price ticket line in Times Square and going to matinees.”

— Trey Anastasio

“I was born in Jersey City and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey. It's a town that's next to Jersey City, and I'm still there!”

— Tammy Blanchard

“I believe the challenge the city faces is attracting continued development into the inner and western part of Jersey City. Nobody should be left behind as Jersey City continues to prosper and grow.”

— Vincent Frank

“I do feel we can create more jobs and opportunities for Jersey City residents, but in the spirit of free enterprise, I do not think it is right to force companies to hire a fixed percentage of local residents.”

— Vincent Frank

“I had never really felt settled in Brooklyn. I think it had to do with growing up in New Jersey and being someone who her whole life wanted to live in the city, and the city meant Manhattan.”

— Dani Shapiro

“Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.”

— David Souter

“I came when I was in high school as part of a student exchange program with the Jewish Community Center in New Jersey, to Ramat Eliyahu. You come and volunteer for five weeks at a day camp. I was a teenager - I couldn't really appreciate it as much, and now I come back as an adult and I can really get the flavor of the city, and I love it.”

— Zach Braff

“I went to Jersey City State College to please a family member. I wasn't prepared for school. To say I failed out is putting it nicely.”

— Derek Luke

“I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known.”

— Norman Mailer

“The 'Ms. Marvel' mantle has passed to 'Kamala Khan,' a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family.”

— G. Willow Wilson

“I think, growing up in a small town - I grew up in a lot of different places. I grew up in a city environment, a more suburban environment, a more rural environment. That's the beauty of New Jersey is you get a lot of different types of living.”

— Halsey

“You'll find little schools of musicians experimenting with different ways of making music in Brooklyn, all through Manhattan, in Queens, in Jersey, you know? The city is still bubbling with creativity.”

— Chick Corea

“They came out into the open, and it was the grimy backwaters of Jersey City now. Tall factory stacks, and fires burning, and spreads of stagnant stinking water.
On and on the ride went. On and on and on.
They turned north soon and left the big city and all its little satellites behind them, and after a while even the rusty glow on the horizon died down and was gone. Then trees began, and little lumpy hills, and there was nothing but the darkness and the night and the fear. ("The Number's Up")”

— Cornell Woolrich

“In a way, Jersey really supports rock, maybe more than New York City and Long Island. I know plenty of bands that tour and do much better at Starland or other clubs in New Jersey than others in the tri-state area.”

— Eddie Trunk

“I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.”

— Richard Price

“It was actually a lot more helpful to have Calvin Hart, a cop, as my template. He was also my technical advisor on Shaft. This time, I kinda got to go to Jersey City with him, and hang around, and watch him interact with other cops, people in the projects, and see what it means to be him. People call him 'Big Daddy' and he's this larger-than-life hero to a lot of people.”

— Samuel L. Jackson

“Growing up in Jersey City was interesting. I got to learn a lot about different cultures: I had Hindu friends, Middle Eastern friends, black friends, Spanish friends.”

— Michelle Rodriguez

“All I'm saying is we got plenty of Texans, and people from Montana, and New Jersey, and Wyoming, or Kansas City. We got plenty of actors. So we don't need some cat from Cardiff-upon-Rosemary-upon-Thyme, or whatever the hell it is, playing people from Montana. And in the reverse, they got plenty of people from Cardiff-upon-Rosemary-upon-Thyme that they don't need our asses coming over there trying to do British accents.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

“The only time I've ever been mistaken for someone else is - and this arguable still - when a person came up to me on the boardwalk of Ocean City, New Jersey and said, "You look a lot like that guy from computer ads" and I said, "There is a reason because I am that guy," and the guy looked at me for a minute, laughed and said, "That's a funny joke, but you really do look like him." He thought I was not me.”

— John Hodgman

“During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections.”

— Martin Scorsese

“When I was about 11, 12, we moved to Jersey City. Everywhere I go I'm an outsider.”

— Michelle Rodriguez

“The way I survived growing up in Jersey City was by being funny. It wasn't by being tough. Nobody thought of me as a tough kid, except for the kids I beat up.”

— Michelle Rodriguez

“New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.”

— Fran Lebowitz