Quotes about london

Pauline Neville-Jones -

We owe it to the victims of the suicide bombers who struck London on 7 July 2005 to find out how the attacks happened and to learn the lessons that will spare lives in the future.

Bat for Lashes -

When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.

Kenneth Clarke -

However, we do not lack anti-terrorist laws. I do not believe that the recent London bombs were the result of any deficiencies in our legal system.

Charlotte Brontë - Villette

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?

J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

He was a poet and they are never exactly grown-up.

Sarah Brightman -

I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain.

Jourdan Dunn -

I mean, I suppose when I'm in London, I'm home so I'm more comfortable.

Niall Horan -

I don't get to go home as much as I used to, which is a shame. But I don't mind because my mum moved over to London to look after me. I rented her a house just around the corner.

Felicity Jones -

It's nice to have some continuity you can come back to. I feel that in coming home, coming back to London.

Rachel Zoe -

Fall 2013 was inspired by the 1970s equestrian lifestyle. I wanted to incorporate the moody and romantic - intricate baroque detailing and classic menswear elements - with something tougher and edgier in a nod to London's rock n' roll underground.

Chiara Ferragni -

The first thing that inspires me is my mood, but I take inspiration from a lot of things: a rock song, a romantic movie or a specific lifestyle, like 1960s London and, of course, Italian 'dolce vita!'

Jean Hanff Korelitz -

The Thames could be thought of as England's longest archaeological site, and no fewer than 90,000 objects recovered from its foreshore are in the collection of the Museum of London, whose 30-year relationship with London mudlarks is both committed and highly regulated.

Peter Shaffer -

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

Amanda Craig - A Vicious Circle

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten..

Arthur Conan Doyle - Volume I

How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!

William Trevor - The Love Department

A child in London asked her father what autumn was, having heard it spoken of these days, and the father in explanation said it was a season, though not a major one. In cities, this father said, you did not feel autumn so much, not as you felt the heat of summer or the bite of winter air, or even the slush of spring. He said that, and then the next day sent for the child and said he had been talking nonsense. 'Autumn is on now,' he said. 'You can see it in the parks,' and he took his child for a

Zadie Smith -

A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lo

Charlotte Eriksson - Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so scared of living, so I wanted to die. Or maybe so scared of dying that I refused to live. You don't have to be afraid to fall, when you're already on the ground. You don't have to be scared to lose someone, when there's no one around to lose.

Charlotte Eriksson - Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

Let me wake up next to you, have coffee in the morning and wander through the city with your hand in mine, and I'll be happy for the rest of my fucked up little life.

Waterstones -

Words cannot do justice to the pleasures of a good bookshop. Ironically.(Waterstones Trafalgar Square)

Ian Ayris - Abide With Me

Cos there's holes in this world,see. Holes. And the likes of Thommo, and Keith, and me, and Kenny, we just sort of fall through em. We weren't never bad kids, we just didn't have nothing to hold on to, that's all.

Monica Ali - Brick Lane

They were both lost in cities that would not pause even to shrug

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his d

Helen Smith - Alison Wonderland

I never realized before that taking care of someone makes you love them more than when they take care of you.

Diane Samuels - Kindertransport: A Drama

Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable

Rhys Bowen - Her Royal Spyness

So none of the young men we encountered during our season gave you hot pants for them?Belinda! Your language. I've been mingling with Americans. Such fun. So Naughty.

Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

The sad fact is, there are 7.220.400.641 people on the planet, but right now I haven't got a single one to talk to.

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

Why do you always rescue me?" — "Every Cinderella needs a fairy godmother. But sometimes your fairy godmother needs you right back.

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

And this way, l'll leave everything behind before it gets the chance to do the same to me.

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

Love puts itself first, and makes its own plans. It maps you out instead. Maybe that's what makes it perfect

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

They say that life is just a blank chain, and precious moments are the beads we hang off it to make it beautiful.

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

I can change my plans. But I can't change my family.

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

My Best Friend and I have spent plenty of time together, despite me being in my First Ever Relationship. This is because friends should always come first.

Holly Smale - Picture Perfect

Reason to move to New York: I don't to get left behind

Henry James - The Awkward Age

I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash", as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.

John Owen Theobald - These Dark Wings

Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out.

Julia Gregson -

From the top of the bus she could see the vast bowl of London spreading out to the horizon: splendid shops with mannequins in the window, interesting people and already a much bigger world.

Julia Gregson - East of the Sun

One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.

Yevgeny Zamyatin - The Fisher Of Men

Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium...Something had happened. The black sky above Lond

P.D. James - The Private Patient

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments

Andrew Coster - TRUE DAWN FALSE DAWN: GLOBAL COLLAPSE OF THE DO-RE-MI

He reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own grHe reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spr

Andrew Coster - TRUE DAWN FALSE DAWN: GLOBAL COLLAPSE OF THE DO-RE-MI

He reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own great adventures, he believed perhaps they, like he, would give way to pause to reflect on how...hard it always was to open his eyes to begin a new day...

Zadie Smith - NW

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

Tracey-anne McCartney - A Carpet of Purple Flowers

He threw the knife at Karian’s face, deliberately catching his temple. “Sons of Kings shouldn’t play with sharp toys.

J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan

The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.

J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.

Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Kano -

London, London, London town,You can toughen up or get thrown around.

Charlotte Eriksson -

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.

Charlotte Eriksson -

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeAnother vagabond lost to love.4am alone and on my way.These are my finest moments.I scrub my skinto rid me from youand I still don’t know why I cried.It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn’t recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look b

John Betjeman - Selected Poems

And marbled clouds go scudding byThe many-steepled London sky.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience

I wander through each chartered street,Near where the chartered Thames does flow;A mark in every face I meet,Marks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every man,In every infant’s cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear:How the chimney-sweeper’s cryEvery blackening church appals,And the hapless soldier’s sighRuns in blood down palace-walls.But most, through midnight streets I hearHow the youthful harlot’s curseBlasts the new-born infant’s tear,And blights wi

Wendy Cope - Serious Concerns

On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.I wipe them away with a black woolly gloveAnd try not to notice I've fallen in loveOn Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.But the juke-box inside me is playing a songThat says something different. And when was it wrong?On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hairI am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.the head does its best but the heart is

Arthur Conan Doyle - Volume I

It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself."Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.""The board-schools.""Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser,

Peter Ackroyd - Hawksmoor

Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt.Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not?And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more.

Kay Goodstadt - Love and Death Over Tea

Fidelity is a living, breathing entity. On wobbly footing, it can wander, becoming something different entirely.

Darcus Howe -

...I never once believed what they wanted us to believe - that we as black people are inferior to whites...

Alexander McCall Smith - Chocolate

Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...

Benedict Cumberbatch -

I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.

T.S. Eliot - Selected Poems

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.There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson!You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae!That corpse you planted last year in your g

Amanda Craig - A Vicious Circle

Novelists,’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist – as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think,’ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.

Nick Cohen -

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22: A Memoir

In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.

Eric Hobsbawm -

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to

Charlotte Eriksson - Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definitio

Kristen Callihan - Firelight

Because we know he was simply a man, with weakness and frailties. Who yearned for the same things all of us do--to love and be loved

Tracey Emin - Strangeland

I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.

Sara Sheridan -

When you're depressed you retreat and you go into a smaller world. This is why Brighton worked well for the story, because it's a smaller world than London.

Nick Bantock -

I've started to hate this city, this country, all these STUPID FUCKING PEOPLE.

Sara Sheridan - On Starlit Seas

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

Anna Quindlen - Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Kassandra Cross - Sex with the CEO: A Billionaire Romance

The city was alive, and so was he...

Jonah Lehrer - Imagine: How Creativity Works

The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.

Sam Starbuck - The Dead Isle

You must live a very free life.""Me?" she laughed. "I am not who swoops out of the sky to rain fire on pirates!""Yeah, but before this I never did much. I mean I did a lot, but...I lived in a room at a university, and my whole world was in that little room. There was this world inside my head."De la Fitte studied his head as if she could see through his skull to a little globe inside it somewhere.

Peter Ackroyd - Hawksmoor

Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters, who are like so many Jakes, Privies, Houses of Office, Ordures, Excrements, Easments and piles of Sir-reverence: the whores of Ratcliffe High-way smell of Tarpaulin and stinking Cod from their continuall Traffick with seamen's Breeches. There are other such wretched Obj

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Bruce-Partington Plans

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

Christopher Fowler - Seventy-Seven Clocks

The clouds of night opened like ink blossoming in water.

Boris Johnson -

I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.

Oliver Harris - The Hollow Man

I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine

Tom Greer -

Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them.

Charlotte Eriksson -

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeanother vagabond lost to love.

Olivia Sudjic - Sympathy

The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.

Jennifer Loiske - Club Number Five

You don't think you're a vampire, Sam. That kind of thing you know.

Jennifer Loiske - Club Number Five

He hugged me, and I let him press me against his godlike body. What? A girl should have some fun sometimes.

Jennifer Loiske - Club Number Five

Could I be brave enough to look lower? I could. His black tee shirt licked his hard body and I could only guess what was hidden underneath it. His faded jeans hung dangerously low, revealing a slice of his narrow hips, and I could easily imagine the rest.

Gemma Seltzer - Speak to Strangers

Day 72I remember oranges and you don’t mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you’re touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the ch

J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

The fairies, as their custom, clapped their hands with delight over their cleverness, and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it.

Charlotte Eriksson -

My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music.

Thomas Jefferson -

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

Anna Quindlen - Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

Boris Johnson -

In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: 'We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park experience to a new level.' And of course I wish Thierry and his colleagues every possible luck, and I am sure it will be wonderful. But I cannot conceal my feelings; and the more I think of those millions of beaming kids waving their wands and scampering the Styrofoam turrets of Hogwartse_STmk, and the more I

Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without r

Amanda Craig - Hearts and Minds

But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.

Jack Kerouac - Lonesome Traveler

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

Guy Kawasaki -

Different parts of the world have different attitudes to failure. Arguably, it may take more courage to be an entrepreneur in Sydney, or Paris, or London, or Japan, or Singapore... but an entrepreneur sees the world for what it could be, not what it is.

Sebastian Coe -

The London Games will be designed for the athletes and we will provide them with the very best venues and the very best conditions to pursue their sporting dreams in London.

John Lanchesterter -

It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody

Charles Dickens - Bleak House

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one mi

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