Best 684 quotes in «london quotes» category

Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? [...] This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various Briths broadhseets, Goofy. They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then didn't attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I'd set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as 'The President We Deserve'. He reprinted it in London, under the title, 'The President They Deserve'. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. 'I don't think you quite get it,' he went on, after an honorable pause. 'That means you can't come to the party at all.' I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn't then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won't be slandered and won't refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.

Pur essendosi ormai rassegnata a tenere il cappello fermo con la mano destra, con la quale reggeva pure l’ombrellino e una piccola borsa di velluto blu, Miss Portland procedeva spedita, lo sguardo fisso a terra, ormai a pochi metri dal calesse di Maylon. E lo avrebbe superato senza prestare alcuna attenzione, né all’uomo che lo guidava né al cavallo che lo tirava, se l’ottavo conte di Maylon non ne fosse smontato con un salto e non le si fosse parato davanti sbarrandole la strada. «Miss Portland, è un piacere insperato incontrarvi.» Sophie sussultò e sollevando lo sguardo si trovò di fronte quell’uomo. Che nelle ultime due settimane tante volte era riuscita abilmente a evitare. Lo fissò senza nascondere la propria sorpresa e, con un semplice «Lord Maylon» e una frettolosa riverenza, si apprestò a proseguire il proprio cammino. Tentativo sprecato, perché lui, di nuovo, le si parò davanti. Che cosa voleva da lei? «Ho appena fatto visita alla vostra madrina, illudendomi di incontrarvi, Miss Portland. Ma è evidente che non ho avuto questa fortuna. Così, quando vi ho vista, ho sperato che mi avreste fatto l’onore di lasciarvi ricondurre a casa.» La mano ancora sul cappello, il pericoloso ombrellino puntato verso di lui come una lancia in resta, Sophie socchiuse gli occhi come per osservarlo meglio e, senza giri di parole, gli chiese: «Per quale ragione, Lord Maylon, vorreste ricondurmi a casa, quando sono quasi arrivata?» *** Tutte le risposte che vennero alle labbra di sua signoria non avrebbero potuto essere riferite a Sophie senza il ricorso a imbarazzanti spiegazioni. Se le avesse detto che voleva riaccompagnarla a casa per poter rimanere finalmente solo con lei, anche se per pochi minuti, avrebbe dovuto spiegarle anche il perché di quel desiderio. Avrebbe dovuto confessarle che da quando si erano incontrati non faceva che pensare a lei. Con un’intensità fastidiosa e insistente, tanto da non essere più riuscito a guardare né tantomeno a toccare un’altra donna. No, questa spiegazione era fuori luogo, l’avrebbe scandalizzata: era una debuttante, dopo tutto. Avrebbe potuto dirle che voleva respirare il suo profumo, che sapeva di mughetti e viole, gioire del suo sorriso coinvolgente e pericolosamente sensuale, sentirsi circondato dalla vitalità e dal calore che il suo corpo sprigionava, ascoltare la sua voce e perdersi nei suoi occhi. Scartò anche questa ipotesi, ritenendo che tale risposta avrebbe potuto apparire a Miss Portland non solo esagerata ma del tutto sciocca. Quindi, con tono rude e sguardo severo, si limitò a fornirle più che una sola motivazione, un intero elenco di ragioni inappuntabili. «Primo, perché è tardi, Miss Portland, e Lady Rumphill era molto preoccupata che non foste ancora rientrata a casa. Secondo, perché la borsa che portate è talmente pesante che, se non ve ne liberate subito, domani avrete difficoltà a muovere le braccia... a proposito, quando contate di leggere tutti quei libri, Miss Portland?... e, terzo, perché altrimenti finirete col perdere quel delizioso cappello di paglia che a quanto pare non vuole rimanervi sulla testa. Forse perché la vostra testa è talmente dura da scoraggiare anche un cappello. Allora, salite o devo convincervi in altro modo?» «È questo che pensate della mia testa, my lord?» gli rispose lei, le labbra arrotondate in un Oh! oltraggiato. «Questo, e molto altro.» «Non oso davvero chiedervi cosa intendiate per molto altro, ma presumo sia meglio evitare di darvi quest’ulteriore soddisfazione.» E mentre diceva queste parole, docile docile Miss Portland gli permise di aiutarla a salire sul calesse, mentre lui, pur sorpreso dalla resa di lei, ancora sogghignava per quella risposta tagliente. ***

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 daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.

She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.

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

She honestly could not tell if she loved London or loathed it. For she could not decide for herself what London was at all.

She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.

Sinter: And if there’s anything you want from London let me know. I’ll send it Andy: Really, you’d ship over Tom Hiddleston? That’s sweet

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.

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!" Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!" A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?" "This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window." I couldn't believe I was hearing this.

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds.

Somehow the painted door now stood open. Blaise was following Livia through it, past Throgmorton's outstretched arm. Sunni shed her slippers and hurried after them, still not quite believing they were walking through what she had thought was only paint on a wall.

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?

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.

Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

The hours stretch out in summer, the evenings go on and on; has he lost track of hours? Where are you, Zachariah? Come home! Rachel stands by the windows again, listening to the thrum in Camden Road and the Gardens behind, everything noisier on long summer afternoons, streets and voices, people speaking louder even face-to-face as if fighting to be heard over the seasonal rush of blood, over the bright light and heightened smells and unusual clamour of days. The city transfigured this year almost overnight and it has not rained in weeks. How the sun shines, how the rain falls, the qualities of light and precipitation, London has a microclimate all its own. London weather has powers of change, change and conjuration.

The I shall have London," - Sebastian Morgenstern

She didn't really know London, only lived in it.

Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There’s no natural light in this pub, so it’s dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They’re so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I’ve turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don’t make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can’t afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound.

Tea at the Ritz is the last delicious morsel of Edwardian London. The light is kind, the cakes are frivolous and the tempo is calm, confident and leisurely.

That was what I loved most about the capital; as terrifying and vast as it was, the opportunity for wonder existed. People could meet and part as in dreams.

The air used to be clean and the sex used to be dirty. Now it is the other way around. Soho [London] has lost its heart.

The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.

The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul's, he tripped and fell over a piece of rubble -- a tombstone. When he got to his feet and dusted himself down he saw that it read, in Latin, 'Resurgam' -- 'I Will Rise Again.

The city outside, so busy, so full of life, seemed in stark contrast to the deathly silence inside their home. It seemed...like a muffled silence, as if the house itself was holding its breath, waiting...

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

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.

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 past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.

The clouds of night opened like ink blossoming in water.

The cold is waiting to ooze through the soles of your shoes. Maggot-damp, this city is festering: home to hollow faces of grey flesh. They stare from windows unclean, into the sun never reaches: dismal lives lived in dismal constriction.

The coppers, thinking I must be hacked to bits at the bottom of the Thames, now blame both murders on the Ripper. The theory is so ironic I cannot help but snort out a tirade of titters.

The dog sniffed at the bonfire like a ship with a wet nose docking at a foreign port." -Mgru

The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square.

The first twenty-four hours of a young man's life in London usually settled his eternity in heaven or hell.

The lushery, much like myself, is covered in a layer of grime that succeeds in filling the area with a miserable kind of murkiness, much like the soot that swathes over the city I call home.

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

The officer's question already let me know that in his eyes I was dirt; that is, matter out of place.

The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That’s what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.

There's this thing you're supposed to be part of in London. But what is it? That's the million-dollar question. Everyone's there because they're searching, aspiring. A very small percentage is actually living the dream. Ill, tired, unhappy, the rent is fucking loads, what is it you're getting? The idea of it, or something.

There is no river in the world to be compared for majesty and the witchery of association, to the Thames; it impresses even the unreading and unimaginative watcher with a solemnity which he cannot account for, as it rolls under his feet and swirls past the buttresses of its many bridges; he may think, as he experiences the unusual effect, that it is the multiplicity of buildings which line its banks, or the crowd of sea-craft which floats upon its surface, or its own extensive spread. In reality he feels, although he cannot explain it, the countless memories which hang for ever like a spiritual fog over its rushing current. ("The Phantom Model")

There’s someone for everyone, here in London, they always say.

There's only one London. That's it. We are what we are.

This is the bottom of the shit heap this city. They can keep their Boys From the Blackstuff and Derek Hatton. I'd die in a place like this after growing up in London. I mean, London's shit, but it's home and nothing like Liverpool. This city has to be the arsehole of England. I don't blame Yosser Hughes for nutting everything in sight. I'd have done the same.

The law is a tedious profession and is relieves the boredom by its own little comedies

The return of the rain, beating out time on London's rooftops and pavements. Early morning Zombies sheltering beneath copies of the Standard whilst others ran screaming for cover in doorways because water from the heavens is holy and melts the undead.

There were whole secret sections that did their work underground then, and sections of the London tube system were used as part of it. There were also plenty of bunkers and tunnels built for use in the event of an invasion.", FADE by Kailin Gow

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.

These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.

The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…