LONDON QUOTES III
quotations about London
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 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
I love thee, London! for thy many men,
And for thy mighty deeds and scenes of glory.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
"London", The Angel World and Other Poems
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
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.
JACK KEROUAC
Lonesome Traveler
A flat black bug, that is London.
PAUL VERLAINE
The Sky above the Roof
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
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 -- a place you go to get bronchitis.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, Dick Enberg's Humorous Quotes for All Occasions
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 is a splendid place to live in for those who can get out of it.
GEORGE JOHN GORDON BRUCE
The Observer, Oct. 1, 1944
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 city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member.
ALEC WAUGH
The Sugar Islands
London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there.
SANDOR MARAI
Portraits of a Marriage
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
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
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 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
London is a corporation by prescription, known by several names.
J. S. F.
The Citizen's Pocket Chronicle; Containing a Digested View of the History, Antiquity, and Temporal Government of the City of London