"I want to go to Brooklyn."
--William Makepeace Thackeray, 1852

"Brooklyn happens to be one of those things that can expand. The more you put in it, the more it will hold."
--Brooklyn Monthly, 1869

"It'd take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo. An' even den, yuh wouldn't know it all."
--Thomas Wolfe, 1935

"Terribly funny, yes, but Brooklyn is also a sad brutal provincial lonesome human silent sprawling raucous lost passionate subtle bitter immature innocent perverse tender mysterious place, a place where Crane and Whitman found poems, a mythical dominions against whose shores the Coney Island sea laps a wintry lament."
--Truman Capote, 1946

"John Paul lingered over the small details of his goodbye at Shea Stadium. He evoked partisan roars as he saluted the parts of the metropolis with slow, deep-voiced care: 'Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut. And Brooklyn.' His pronunciation of the latter--'Broke-leen'--was savored by the crowd, and they responded with their biggest roar of outer-borough, suburbanite approval.... 'Brooklyn. It is my second visit to Brooklyn--the second in my life.'"
--The New York Times, 1979