Best 684 quotes in «london quotes» category

Those who romanticize war often like to think of it, at least in areas of mortal peril, as nothing but “guts and glory.” Those who are inclined to pacifism, by contrast, often think of it as an unbroken sequence of horrors. Actually, however, people in wartime still fall in love, do the laundry, worry about pimples, drink beer, and do most of the same things that they do in times of peace. The patterns of daily life may be mundane, but they are remarkably tenacious. But, while people in wartime still go about their daily routines, the prospect of imminent death can give even quotidian chores a heightened intensity. When the first bombs were dropped on London in autumn of 1940, the population bore adversity better than almost anybody had expected. The danger was mixed with excitement, and the terror had a sort of apocalyptic magnificence.

To catch the bad guys, you've got to think like a bad guy - and that's why all the best detectives have a dark side...

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 garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!

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.

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 respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.

We are all works in progress, the authors of our own lives.

Victoria sighed deeply as the clock tower bell chimed midnight. Light snowflakes, almost weightless, began drifting down from the sky. Tiny, white butterflies danced in the wind among the bare trees. The two young people turned their eyes up towards the dark sky. "The fairies are weeping," she whispered. "What?" asked Ted, looking back at her. Victoria turned her grey eyes back at him and smiled. "In the lands of the north they say that when snowflakes fall at midnight, they are the tears of fairies falling on the ground. The fairies are weeping.

We took a bus to Victoria, then passed on foot into a vast, desolate region of stucco streets and squares upon which a doom seemed to have fallen. The gloom was cosmic.

We are Henceforth-mongers, trying to make our Henceforth the most enticing. Because the secret of everyone who comes to London - who comes to any big city - is that they came here because they did not feel normal, back at home. The only way they will ever feel normal is if they hijack popular culture with their weirdness... and make the rest of the world suddenly wish to become as weird as them.

We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings---" And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought. "---and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances" - here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs - "and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a solider, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith. "But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, thought hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do 'our bit'. For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long.

When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map, that elegant multicolored topographical display of underground railway lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of the city above. It was like belonging to a political party, he thought once, proudly, and then, having tried to explain the resemblance between the Tube map and politics, at a party, to a cluster of bewildered strangers, he had decided in the future to leave political comment to others.

When you come to London, bring a lot of money, I'll get you a date! lololololol

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.

Where one waits for that peremptory, half-melancholy, half-majestic sound of a ship blowing as she silently glides out black in the night, almost through the pub yard, from the docks basin on her voyage.

While in England write or get wrought rotten rusted.

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

Without the queen pulling your strings, you’re nothing but thoughts and dreams. Such things are easily destroyed." ~ General Kael, City of Fae #2

What a shocking bad hat!' was the phrase that was next in vogue. No sooner had it become universal, than thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat shewed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the war-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats. He was a wise man who, finding himself under these circumstances 'the observed of all observers,' bore his honours meekly. He who shewed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice. The mob soon perceive whether a man is irritable, and, if of their own class, they love to make sport of him. When such a man, and with such a hat, passed in those days through a crowded neighbourhood, he might think himself fortunate if his annoyances were confined to the shouts and cries of the populace. The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed, in the pauses of their mirth, 'Oh, what a shocking bad hat!' 'What a shocking bad hat!' Many a nervous poor man, whose purse could but ill spare the outlay, doubtless purchased a new hat before the time, in order to avoid exposure in this manner.

You boys may be gentlemen," Dusty said. "But I'm about to shoot like a lady. You ready, baby?

What an amazing thing is the coming of spring to London. The very pavements seem ready to crack and lift under the denied earth; in the air is a consciousness of life which tells you that if traffic stopped for a fortnight grass would grow again in Piccadilly and corn would spring in pavement cracks where a horse had spilt his 'feed'. And the squares of London, so dingy and black since the first October gale, fill week by week with the rising tide of life, just as the sea, running up the creeks and pushing itself forward inch by inch towards the land, comes at last to each remote rock pool.

You can see the people who thought they could come to London, bend over and pick gold off the streets. They’re all lying on benches in Trafalgar Square with hernias and cans of Special Brew.

You don’t live in London. You play London - to win. That’s why we’re all here. It is a city full of contestants, each chasing one of a million possible prizes: wealth, love, fame. Inspiration.

You’ll have to do better than that chaps, if you want to kill me!

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

You look at me as if I were a conjuror,' Holmes remarked, with a laugh.

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.

Wiv difficulty 'an injinuity. Jest bein' smart, like.

Your own exploration therefore has to be personalized; you're doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.

Your successes were never due to your brains. You achieved them because you have “character.

A bicycle has transformed my experience of London.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

A big reason I wanted to do a tour was because I'm from Michigan and not many things go to Michigan. Most conventions are in like London or Florida or California, and that's about it.

Although I'm not from London originally: I moved down here when I was 16, so it's played a part in my life. It's where I've lived for all that time.

Although I have lived in London, I have never really considered London my home because it was always going to be a stopping-off point for me, and it has been too.

Americans are immensely popular in Paris; and this is not due solely to the fact that they spend lots of money there, for they spend just as much or more in London, and in the latter city they are merely tolerated because they do spend.

Almost every one of my various zero numbered birthdays has had a big concert in London and often in Paris.

And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue - you know - of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician. And I just couldn't quite accept that.

And I had known Peter O'Toole before in London. And I'd liked him very much. And the thought of being in a picture with him was very challenging to me. And he was playing the starring role.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

All over London as one walks, one everywhere, in the season, sees oranges to sell; and they are in general sold tolerably cheap, one and even sometimes two for a halfpenny; or, in our money, threepence.

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.

As I came down the Highgate Hill, The Highgate Hill, the Highgate Hill, As I came down the Highgate Hill, I met the sun's bravado, And saw below me, fold on fold, Grey to pearl and pearl to gold, This London like a land of old, The land of Eldorado.

And it was only released in London last week, so when I go back to England Monday or whatever, I am expecting heaps of adulation. I'm hoping there is. If that doesn't happen I will be disappointed.

And I myself, in Rome, heard it said openly in the streets, "If there is a hell, then Rome is built on it." MARTIN LUTHER, Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

A study of the panics of 1873, 1893, and 1907 indicates that these panics were the result of the international bankers' operations in London.

A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can’t find a parking place.

As soon as that was kind of green-lit, it became very obvious to me what I wanted to do and it was an instinctive reaction to my relationship with how I wear my Ugg boots. Which is in London and in New York, I wear them as soon as I get in basically.

A universal sound is about having everybody be able to relate to it whether you're in New York, LA, London or Australia. You have to be able to universally be brought back to a place where they can relate to you as an artist.

Billions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in bad deals. The London Underground modernisation, personally negotiated by one of Gordon Brown's team, was a disaster, as the National Audit Office has confirmed.