London Quotes

“I stop dead in my tracks. Someone behind me walks into me and swears (stopping abruptly in central London is a heinous crime, and immediately gives the people around you permission to kick you).”
― Beth O'Leary, The Flatshare

“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”
― Kailin Gow, Fade

“London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air. Leonard hurried through her tinted wonders, very much part of the picture. His was a grey life, and to brighten it he had ruled off a few corners for romance.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“I have admired the romantic elegance of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, have felt the mystic message from a thousand glittering windows at sunset in New York, but to me the view of the London Thames from our hotel window transcends them all for utilitarian grandeur - something deeply human.”
― Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography

“As Londoners, we are – you see – drama itself and have no reason to whip ourselves up into states with sirens and altercations. We like the police to be quiet, the ambulances discreet, and the fire engines jolly.”
― V.S. Pritchett, London Perceived

“London was a hodgepodge of centuries, banging elbows like drunks at a bar”
― Alexis Hall, Pansies

“Noon comes with bells on, because this is London, and London is a city of bells. From its heart to its ragged edges, they bisect the day in a jangle of sound: peals and tinkles and deep bass knells. They ring from steeples and clocktowers, from churches and town halls, in an overlapping celebration of the everyday fact that time passes.”
― Mick Herron, London Rules

“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.”
― V.S. Pritchett, London Perceived

“In no other city can one so cheerfully enjoy the accidents of bad art.”
― V.S. Pritchett

“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”
― Molly Ringle, All the Better Part of Me

“The law is a tedious profession and is relieves the boredom by its own little comedies”
― V.S. Pritchett, London Perceived

“I stare at my hands and remember my dad's and how I trusted them when I was a kid until I learned that they could turn into fists. And words could hurt even more than the bruises.”
― A. Zukowski, Liam for Hire

“And the ground and the dirty buildings on either side fell away, dropping out of sight as the car rose; in seconds, the whole of London lay, smoky and glittering, below them.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“O encanto da Londres moderna é ser construída não para durar, é ser construída para passar. Sua fragilidade, sua transparência, seus ornamentos de estuque colorido causam um prazer diferente e atingem um objetivo diferente do desejado e tentado pelos velhos construtores e seus patronos - a nobreza da Inglaterra. Seu orgulho exigiu a ilusão da permanência. O nosso, pelo contrário, parece deleitar-se em provar que podemos tornar a pedra e o tijolo tão transitórios quanto nossos próprios desejos. Não construímos para nossos descendentes, que podem viver nas nuvens ou na terra, mas para nós mesmos e nossas necessidades. Derrubamos e reconstruímos enquanto esperamos ser derrubados e reconstruídos. É um impulso provocador da criação e da fertilidade. A descoberta é estimulada e a invenção fica em alerta.”
― Virginia Woolf, The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life

“Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“This beautiful city is so vast it holds the story of every soul who's ever walked along the banks of the Thames.”
― Susannah Conway, Londontown: A Photographic Tour of the City's Delights

“A few people paused to look at him, but Londoners were by now so accustomed to 'weirdies' of all kinds that his ritual aroused little interest.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“It was while I was seated in an easy-chair in the street the following evening, smoking, watching the combustion of this structure, that something was suddenly born in me, something out of Hell, and I smiled a smile that never man smiled. And I said: 'I will burn: I will return to London...”
― M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud

“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.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to be Famous

“Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“Campbell Road, so he had been told by long-serving colleagues, and some of The Bunk’s inhabitants, was home to the most notorious criminals: thieves, prostitutes, fraudsters – every sort of rogue and vagabond drifted through this slum. Unbelievable as it seemed to Franks, some had settled and been resident a very long while. If a couple of women – one who looked like she’d had seven bells beaten out of her – wanted to set about a well-known brass, it didn’t take a genius to work out that one of their old men was playing away. Bickerstaff might be a stickler for doing things by the book but, in the great scheme of things, this was a petty domestic incident. The Bunk community had its own system of justice. Franks agreed with it: leave them be to shovel up their own shit.”
― Kay Brellend, The Street

“Like a kelpie the sunlight feigns innocence until it meets my skin, transforming into a sharp-toothed monster that tears away at my cold dead flesh.”
― Ilse V. Rensburg, Blood Sipper

“I do so dislike H. G. Wells being accompanied by Wagner, don't you Mr. Ford?”

… he was forced to acknowledge the aptness of the phrase. Nazism combines a crassly mechanical futurism with the fuss and fume of a tawdry pseudo-Gothic misconception of the past.”
― John Strachey, Digging for Mrs. Miller: Some Experiences of an Air-Raid Warden

“In this pittifull (or rather pittilesse) perplexitie stood London, forsaken like a Lover, forlorne like a widow, and disarmde of all comfort.”
― Thomas Dekker, Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker

“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.”
― John King, The Football Factory

“The officer's question already let me know that in his eyes I was dirt; that is, matter out of place.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“I hope whomever Miss Trent is sending arrives soon.” Mr Maxwell shivered and wrapped his arms about himself. “Who does she usually send to these initial client meetings?”
“I really couldn’t say,” [Miss Dexter] replied, honestly. “Miss Trent sends whomever she feels would be most appropriate.”
― T.G. Campbell, The Case of the Curious Client

“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.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to be Famous

“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.”
― Sebastian Horsley

“The Thames here had a vastly different character to the wide, muddy tyrant that seethed through London. It was graceful and deft and remarkably light of heart. It skipped over stones and skimmed its banks, water so clear that one could see the reeds swaying deep down on her narrow bed. The river here was a she, he'd decided. For all its sunlit transparency, there were certain spots in which it was suddenly unfathomable.”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter