LONDON QUOTES III
quotations about London
London is like a woman with too many years to encourage confession.
LOUISE CLOSSER HALE
We Discover New England
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
Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.
THOMAS MOORE
"Rhymes on the Road", The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore
London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member.
ALEC WAUGH
The Sugar Islands
Behind everything in London is something else, and, behind that, is something else still; and so on through the centuries, so that London as we see her is only the latest manifestation of other Londons, and to lover her is to plunge into ancestor-worship.
H. V. MORTON
In Search of London
London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there.
SANDOR MARAI
Portraits of a Marriage
London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Maria Gisborne, 1820
London -- a place you go to get bronchitis.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, Dick Enberg's Humorous Quotes for All Occasions
How can you ever be late for anything in London? They have a huge clock right in the middle of the town.
JIMMY KIMMEL
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Mar. 5, 2013
London is a cluster of communities, great and small, famous and unsung; a city of contrasts, a congregation of diversity.
ROY PORTER
London: A Social History
London is like the grave in one respect -- any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Sketch of the Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne
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 splendid place to live in for those who can get out of it.
GEORGE JOHN GORDON BRUCE
The Observer, Oct. 1, 1944
Down in Farringdon Street the carts, wagons, vans, cabs, omnibuses crossed and intermingled in a steaming splash-bath of mud; human beings, reduced to their due paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of pavement, bound on errands, which were a mockery, driven automaton-like by forces they neither understood nor could resist.
GEORGE GISSING
The Nether World
The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.
JANE AUSTEN
Emma
London is a roost for every bird.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Lothair
London isn't a stodgy place. Trend-setting London is to the United Kingdom what New York City is to the United States: the spot where everything happens first (or ultimately ends up).
DONALD OLSON
England For Dummies
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.
T. S. ELIOT
The Waste Land
London, with its monotonous and melancholy houses, seems like an inharmonious patchwork, as if pieced together without design. Yet it is lovable in its sprawling confusion.
JOSEPH FORT NEWTON
Preaching in London: A Diary of Anglo-American Friendship