Quotes from Christine Quinn

My mother would organize huge parties for my elementary school classmates. To prepare, she would go back to the bakery in her old neighborhood of Inwood and get special shamrock cookies. Hawaiian Punch was served and we had shamrock napkins. It was a lot of fun.

I have big emotions, and I care deeply about delivering for New Yorkers, and sometimes that means you got to push things forward - and I think New Yorkers know that.

I'm an aggressive woman who gets things done, and that's the way it is, and I've never been embarrassed about the fact that I am pushy.

Am I pushy? Yep. Do I like taking 'no' for an answer when 'no' means New Yorkers aren't going to get something they need? No. Do I push back and crack some eggs? Absolutely.

You might as well go through life the way you want to. If what you want is to be engaged and forceful, to 'lean in,' well, do that.

I just want people to know you can get through stuff. I hope people can see that in what my life has been and where it is going.

People have said I can come off a little trial-lawyerish. I tell people I never actually became a lawyer, but I play one at City Hall.

It would be thrilling, obviously, to be able to have a woman and an openly LGBT person as the mayor of New York City.

Congressmember Weiner has shown just a pattern of reckless behavior, an inability to tell the truth, and what New Yorkers deserve is a mayor with a record of delivering for them, of vision, and a level of maturity and responsibility.

I want to be affirmatively proud of what I have made my way through. And to do that, in the same way I had to tell my father and my family and my friends that I was gay, I need to not hide this anymore.

I'm a lesbian. Yup. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. I remember being in college, and I had fallen in love with this woman, and I remember sitting in my dorm room saying out loud to myself, like, 'You have enough problems. You are not gonna let this happen.'

I understand that not everyone agrees with my perspective on Ray Kelly. But what you gotta look at here is somebody like Bill de Blasio talking out of both sides of his mouth and trying to have it both ways on a really critical issue like stop-and-frisk.

My favorite app is 'StumbleUpon,' because it just gives you interesting things that are sometimes exactly the stuff I'm interested in and sometimes just silly and funny.

Bike lanes are clearly controversial. And one of the problems with bike lanes - and I'm generally a supporter of bike lanes - but one of the problems with bike lanes has been not the concept of them, which I support, but the way the Department of Transportation has implemented them without consultation with communities and community boards.

Sometimes I yell, sometimes I raise my voice. I am trying to do it less, because it's not always attractive. It's not always the right thing to do.

Bike lanes - I put that now in the category of things you shouldn't discuss at dinner parties, right? It used to be money and politics and religion. Now, in New York, you should add bike lanes.

I'm going to do whatever I have to do to help a New Yorker, whether it's a girl on the street or a tenant in a housing development.

I think it's really important to realize that small businesses are often the portal for immigrants into the New York City economy.

I think it's really important to realize that small businesses are often the portal for immigrants into the New York City economy. I think we have something like 40,000 small businesses that are immigrant-run in New York.

I have always said I've had a big personality, and I've always said I'm a pushy broad, and I've always said I want to get things done.

New Yorkers have real issues, and they deserve to have a mayor that is prepared to work with them to solve the challenges they have, reduce the problems that they have, and they deserve to have a mayor's race that is focused on them.

I'm a lesbian. Yup. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. I remember being in college, and I had fallen in love with this woman, and I remember sitting in my dorm room saying out loud to myself, like, 'You have enough problems. You are not gonna let this happen.' You just kinda, like, stuff it away until - well, some people stuff it away forever.

At the end of the day, somebody someday is going to say something about you. At least you can look back and say you lived the way you wanted to.

I'm tough, and you know what? New Yorkers deserve that. They work head, they fight it out, they slug it out. And they deserve a mayor or a speaker who's going to do the same.