New York isn't big

“New York isn’t big at all, it’s little. . . . It’s just this one little village, even Times Square, even Beekman Place, repeated over and over hundreds and thousands of times.  Little hamlets.  All nestled up against each other, people stay in them the way they do in villages.  You see if you live in one, they’re there.  But the effect is of one great big terrifying city, a big, immense, full-spectrum, rattling, teeming place.  But it isn’t. It’s just—villages.  But we don’t know.  We say New York and shake in our shoes.”
     (A few months after I got back home in Portland, Oregon, I read a piece in Harper’s magazine or somewhere that said practically the same thing, only sparklingly and with say-so like a high intelligence.)

     --From Ardyth's memoir New York on Five Dollars a Day