London Quotes
140 quotes
"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it."
"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."
"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."
"I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London."
"Fidelity is a living, breathing entity. On wobbly footing, it can wander, becoming something different entirely."
"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
"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..."
"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."
"...I never once believed what they wanted us to believe - that we as black people are inferior to whites..."
"And marbled clouds go scudding byThe many-steepled London sky."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Love puts itself first, and makes its own plans. It maps you out instead. Maybe that's what makes it perfect"
"Why do you always rescue me?" — "Every Cinderella needs a fairy godmother. But sometimes your fairy godmother needs you right back."
"And this way, l'll leave everything behind before it gets the chance to do the same to me."
"They say that life is just a blank chain, and precious moments are the beads we hang off it to make it beautiful."
"I can change my plans. But I can't change my family."
"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."
"Reason to move to New York: I don't to get left behind"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Lisbon, to me, is the Lisbon of Pessoa. Just like London is Woolf’s, or rather, Mrs. Dalloway’s. Barcelona is Gaudí's and Rome is da Vinci’s. You see them in every crevice and hear their echoes in every cathedral. I’d like to be the child, or rather, the mother of a city but I neither have a home nor a resting place. My race is humankind. My religion is kindness. My work is love and, well, my city is the walls of your heart."
"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!"
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
"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.."
"London, London, London town,You can toughen up or get thrown around."
"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."
"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."
"He threw the knife at Karian’s face, deliberately catching his temple. “Sons of Kings shouldn’t play with sharp toys."
"As we drifted away from the Tower Bridge, I saw a single silhouette standing against the bright lamplight. Even now when I was nearly asleep, I could recognise her. Her shoulders were hunched up as if she was upset. Whether she was upset that she had nearly killed me or that she had let me get away, I was unsure. Then she turned around and walked to join the other silhouettes standing in a group farther back. Now I could not see which one was Rose – they were all joint together to make one."
"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."
"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..."
Andrew Coster, TRUE DAWN FALSE DAWN: GLOBAL COLLAPSE OF THE DO-RE-MI
"Words cannot do justice to the pleasures of a good bookshop. Ironically.(Waterstones Trafalgar Square)"
"Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable"
"I never realized before that taking care of someone makes you love them more than when they take care of you."
"They were both lost in cities that would not pause even to shrug"
"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."
"The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted."
"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."
"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."
Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
"I've started to hate this city, this country, all these STUPID FUCKING PEOPLE."
"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."
"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."
"The city was alive, and so was he..."
"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"
"Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business?"
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