LONDON QUOTES
quotations about London
To us London is a hundred different places. It is never easy to know exactly what we mean when we use the word. Indeed, to the question " What is London? " there is no satisfactory answer, unless it be that it is the original little walled city that still exists. It contains St. Paul's Cathedral, the Mansion House, the Guildhall, the Bank of England and London Bridge. Thousands of people work there in the day-time, but no one sleeps there at night but the Lord Mayor of London and a few hundred caretakers. Yet the physical boundaries of this ancient city are still visible. It is still possible to walk along the line of the Roman Wall that centuries ago limited the size of London to one square mile.
H. V. MORTON
In Search of London
Spare London, for London is like the city that thou lovedst.
THOMAS NASH
Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem
One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.
SEBASTIAN FAULKS
Engleby
Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Antic Hay
London is a city that sleeps too much. This is the mould of its quality. A magnetic contract: to reinvent itself on the other side of dream, each day. And such dreams, smouldering against the tidal spine of the river, telling and retelling the tales that must be told to manifest a city's bones. Whispering the night architecture back into stone.
IAIN SINCLAIR
London: A City of Disappearances
I journeyed to London, to the timekept City,
Where the River flows, with foreign flotations.
There I was told: we have too many churches,
And too few chop-houses.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,
Dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight, then lost amidst the forestry
Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;
A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head--and there is London Town.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
London is like a smoky pearl set in a circle of emeralds.
WILLIAM HENRY RIDEING
In the Land of Lorna Doone
London, thou art the flower of cities all!
Gemme of all joy, jasper of jocunditie.
WILLIAM DUNBAR
London
Sir, London is a strange place, and you must look with a keen eye, and stay in it a great while, before you will be a master of half its expedients.
RANDAL
Squire Randal's Excursion round London
Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The Life of Samuel Johnson
But hail thou giant City of the world,
Thou that dost scorn a canopy of clouds,
And in the dimness of eternal smoke,
For ever rising like an ocean-stream,
Dost mantle thine immensity -- how vast
And wide thy wonderful array of domes,
In dusky masses staring at the skies!
ROBERT MONTGOMERY
"London", Religion and Poetry: Being Selections Spiritual and Moral
The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer's morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.
CHARLES DICKENS
Sketches by Boz
London is a dizzying delight, full of pomp and pedigree, a place where high culture and cutting-edge trends feed off one another.
SUZANNE ROWAN KELLEHER, DONALD OLSON & DARWIN PORTER
Frommer's Europe by Rail
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner,
That I love London so;
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner,
That I think of her wherever I go.
I get a funny feeling inside of me,
Just walking up and down;
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner,
That I love London town.
HUBERT GREGG
"Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner"
In many ways, London is like a great big pinata, and everyone who lives here is like an excited, blindfolded child with a heart full of hope and a big flailing stick. Aim that stick right and London will split at the seams like a ruptured spleen, showering you with the most extraordinary places to visit, places like you won't find anywhere else in the world. Get it wrong and the chances are you'll lose your footing and end up in a frustrated, eyeless heap.
PAUL CARR
London by London
In London, love and scandal are considered the best sweeteners of tea.
JOHN OSBORNE
Tom Jones
London is a hell, where the Moloch of globalization is worshipped through the nightshifts.
YOSEFA LOSHITZKY
Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema
A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.
CHINA MIEVILLE
Kraken
Private courts,
Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes
Thrilled by some female vendor's scream, belike
The very shrillest of all London cries,
May then entangle our impatient steps;
Conducted through those labyrinths, unawares,
To privileged regions and inviolate,
Where from their airy lodges studious lawyers
Look out on waters, walks, and gardens green.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The Prelude