LONDON QUOTES II
quotations about London
In this city 300 languages are spoken and the people that speak them live side by side in harmony. This city typifies what I believe is the future of the human race and a future where we grow together and we share and we learn from each other.
KEN LIVINGSTON
press conference, July 8, 2005
London's like a monster with one hundred arms ... as wide as it's long. It's noisy. It's dirty. It's everything. You'll see.
KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND
Crossing to Paradise
My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.
BEN AARONOVITCH
Moon Over Soho
It's brilliant, you can't ever get bored of London cos even if you live here for like a hundred and fifty years you still won't ever know everything about it. There's always something new. Like, you're walking round somewhere you've known since you was born and you look up and there's an old clock on the side of a building you never seen before, or there's a little gargoyley face over a window or something.
RICHARD RIDER
No Beginning, No End
London's like one of the flash women at Frisco -- fine to look at, cruel as the snow.
JOSEPH HATTON
Cruel London
I don't know what London's coming to -- the higher the buildings the lower the morals.
NOEL COWARD
Collected Sketches and Lyrics
London opens to you like a novel itself.... It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
ANNA QUINDLEN
Imagined London
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
PETER ACKROYD
London: The Biography
London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
CHINA MIEVILLE
Kraken
London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.
JOHN BUCHAN
The Three Hostages
There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we come back we have our romance again.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
London is like a woman with too many years to encourage confession.
LOUISE CLOSSER HALE
We Discover New England
This melancholy London -- I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Katharine Tynan, Aug. 25, 1888
London is a world in itself ... It contains within itself all that is gorgeous in wealth, and all that is squalid in poverty; all that is illustrious in knowledge, and all that is debased in ignorance; all that is beautiful in virtue, and all that is revolting in crime. Adequately to chronicle and to describe such a city ... is a task beyond any individual powers.
CHARLES KNIGHT
"A Looking Glass for London", The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Dec/Jan. 1837
Our haughty life is crowned with darkness,
Like London with its own black wreath.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
"Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg"
London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel of London; always as you up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
PETER ACKROYD
London: The Biography
I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
Villette
For the bookish, London is a book. For criminals, a map of opportunities. For unpapered immigrants, it is a nest of skinned eyes; sanctioned gunmen ready to blow your head off as you run for a train. When the city of distorting mirrors revealed itself, through its districts and discriminations, I discovered more about London's past as a reworking of my own submerged history.
IAIN SINCLAIR
London: A City of Disappearances
London is a museum world, and the museum, like the cathedral or the palazzo in their day, is the dominant symbol of our postmodern times. A museum is an imposing assemblage of bits and pieces, history for attention-deficit amnesiacs.
WENDY STEINER
The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism