quotations about London
And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky
JOHN BETJEMAN
"Christmas"
One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
London's like a forest ... we shall be lost in it.
MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON
Taken at the Flood
London is a world of glamour, excitement, activity, amusement and all the attractions of worldly wit and casual relationships; but we also infer that it is a world of endlessly false appearances, a world in which manners substitute for morals, a world given over to cold deception, manipulation and exploitation.
TONY TANNER
Jane Austen
Today's London is a sprawling metropolis, teeming with energy and seemingly swallowing up all in its path, stretching from Surrey to Kent and Essex and receiving around 16 million visitors annually -- over twice its own population.
AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION OF BRITAIN
Illustrated Guide to Britain
If the parks be "the lungs of London" we wonder what Greenwich Fair is -- a periodical breaking out, we suppose -- a sort of spring rash.
CHARLES DICKENS
Greenwich Fair
Respirator, n. An apparatus fitted over the nose and mouth of an inhabitant of London, whereby to filter the visible universe in its passage to the lungs.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
London is like a cold dark dream sometimes.
JEAN RHYS
Wide Sargasso Sea
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Study in Scarlet
And yet London is a solid city, in spite of the broken images it evokes in the mind of a wanderer like myself. There is a grandeur there, an impersonal power of endurance that is somehow comforting beneath the rot.
JAMES WRIGHT
A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright
Never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London ... it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
English Notebooks
London is a bad habit one hates to lose.
ANONYMOUS
London is like a dream come true. As I ramble through it I am haunted by the curious feeling of something half-forgotten, but still dimly remembered, like a reminiscence of some previous state of existence. It is at once familiar and strange.
JOSEPH FORT NEWTON
Preaching in London: A Diary of Anglo-American Friendship
[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.
V. S. PRITCHETT
London Perceived
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets.
ANNA QUINDLEN
Imagined London
London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.
HENRY JAMES
The Awkward Age
London's like a bad set of teeth. There are gaps, there are bad dental bridges just about holding on and there are rotting stumps that needed to be pulled ages ago.
JOHN LAWTON
Then We Take Berlin
Take a perfect day, add six hours of rain and fog, and you have instant London.
ANONYMOUS
Dick Enberg's Humorous Quotes for All Occasions
And there is London!--England's heart and soul.
By the proud flowing of her famous Thames,
She circulates through countless lands and isles
Her greatness; gloriously she rules,
At once the awe and sceptre of the world.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY
"London", Religion and Poetry: Being Selections Spiritual and Moral
I walk to Oxford Street and climb on the number 8. It's freezing and it starts to rain and it's the ugliest bus I've ever seen, rattling down the ugliest streets, in the ugliest city, in the ugliest country, in the ugliest of all possible worlds.
DAVID THEWLIS
The Late Hector Kipling