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Bel Nguyen
A “very young white woman,” Madison grew up in Chelsea with her two mothers, who named her after Madison Avenue because they used an IVF clinic nearby to conceive her. She drives an antique Checker cab for special events. When Manny, acting on instinct, needs to reach FDR Drive to battle the Woman in White’s tendrils, he convinces Madison to drive him. After they succeed in destroying the tendrils on FDR Drive, Madison drives Manny to his apartment in Inwood and makes a blatant pass at him. Though Manny finds Madison attractive, he decides to turn her down gently for reasons unclear even to himself. She accepts his refusal cheerfully. Near the novel’s end, Manny sees her driving the Checker cab again and convinces her to drive him and Paolo to City Hall Station, where New York City’s avatar lies comatose. Madison illustrates how, in the novel, native New Yorkers tend to help the city’s avatars instinctively.
Madison Quotes in The City We Became
The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by Madison or refer to Madison. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Madison Quotes in The City We Became
The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by Madison or refer to Madison. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
