It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

The Hours: A Novel (ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) - ISBN: 9781429957946