100 Quotes About London

I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so scared of living, so I wanted to die. Or maybe so scared of dying that I refused to live. You don't have to be afraid to fall, when you're already on the ground. You don't have to be scared to lose someone, when there's no one around to lose. . Charlotte Eriksson

It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this." I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself." Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea."" The board-schools."" Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future. Arthur Conan Doyle

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!. T.S. Eliot

Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne?And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt. Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not? And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more. Peter Ackroyd

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be. Charlotte Eriksson

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now. Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffee Another vagabond lost to love.4am alone and on my way. These are my finest moments. I scrub my skinto rid me from youand I still don’t know why I cried. It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn’t recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest. But then you must have changed your mindor made a wrongbecause why did youleave?6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now. I replace cafés with crowded bars and empty roads with broken bottlesand this town is healing me slowly but still not slow or fast enough because there’s no right way to do this. There is no right way to do this. There is no right way to do this. . Charlotte Eriksson

Novelists, ’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist — as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think, ’ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever. Amanda Craig

In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi- Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement. Christopher Hitchens

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain — the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims — swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm. Nick Cohen

I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definition of beauty and success like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, for no one saw what I saw, or felt the same as I did, and so I wanted to keep to myself. You hide to protect yourself. Charlotte Eriksson

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners. Eric Hobsbawm

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. P.D. James

I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash", as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob. Henry James

One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions. Julia Gregson

And I'll close by saying this. Because anti- Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this–this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you. . Christopher Hitchens

Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium.. Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements. Yevgeny Zamyatin

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where–as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen–even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their mee . Christopher Hitchens

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. John Owen Theobald

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore. Stephen Fry

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. Peter Shaffer

Lisbon, to me, is the Lisbon of Pessoa. Just like London is Woolf’s, or rather, Mrs. Dalloway’s. Barcelona is Gaudí's and Rome is da Vinci’s. You see them in every crevice and hear their echoes in every cathedral. I’d like to be the child, or rather, the mother of a city but I neither have a home nor a resting place. My race is humankind. My religion is kindness. My work is love and, well, my city is the walls of your heart. Kamand Kojouri

How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!. Arthur Conan Doyle

He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. It is the sound of millions and millions of creatures living and struggling and dying and being born. It commands those who hear it to eat or be eaten.. Amanda Craig

A child in London asked her father what autumn was, having heard it spoken of these days, and the father in explanation said it was a season, though not a major one. In cities, this father said, you did not feel autumn so much, not as you felt the heat of summer or the bite of winter air, or even the slush of spring. He said that, and then the next day sent for the child and said he had been talking nonsense. 'Autumn is on now, ' he said. 'You can see it in the parks, ' and he took his child for a nature walk. William Trevor

A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy. Zadie Smith

London, London, London town, You can toughen up or get thrown around. Kano

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. Jeffrey Eugenides

The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it. J.m. Barrie

It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children. J.m. Barrie

He threw the knife at Karian’s face, deliberately catching his temple. “Sons of Kings shouldn’t play with sharp toys. Traceyanne McCartney

As we drifted away from the Tower Bridge, I saw a single silhouette standing against the bright lamplight. Even now when I was nearly asleep, I could recognise her. Her shoulders were hunched up as if she was upset. Whether she was upset that she had nearly killed me or that she had let me get away, I was unsure. Then she turned around and walked to join the other silhouettes standing in a group farther back. Now I could not see which one was Rose — they were all joint together to make one. Erica Sehyun Song

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself. Zadie Smith

He reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own great adventures, he believed perhaps they, like he, would give way to pause to reflect on how..hard it always was to open his eyes to begin a new day.. Andrew Coster

He reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own gr He reasoned, even as a young man, that traditions may linger as he walked though the oracles of time. In later years he thought his mind may one day blur, should he survive to an old age, but as he spread ink on paper, transmitted and shared with those who came after him his experiences, his own great adventures, he believed perhaps they, like he, would give way to pause to reflect on how..hard it always was to open his eyes to begin a new day. eat adventures, he believed perhaps they, like he, would give way to pause to reflect on how goddamned hard it always was to open his eyes to begin a new day. . Andrew Coster

My novels are set in a global space and pace. However, I have never visited most of the places. I wrote my first book in London but the story took the reader to places in Mexico, Denmark and Russia, and carefully avoided London. I access these global locations with my feet planted in front of my computer. I will use my internet connection to carefully enter the streets of a foreign city and find out how long it will take my main character to get from the airport to the city center — and if there are any shortcuts on the way. I wanted to do something new. The world is becoming a global village and we have to understand these different cultures. There is a Danish culture, an Israeli culture and so on. So if you want to go to Denmark, then read the book. Enock Maregesi

Words cannot do justice to the pleasures of a good bookshop. Ironically.(Waterstones Trafalgar Square) Waterstones

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. Charles Dickens

Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable Diane Samuels

I never realized before that taking care of someone makes you love them more than when they take care of you. Helen Smith

They were both lost in cities that would not pause even to shrug Monica Ali

Cos there's holes in this world, see. Holes. And the likes of Thommo, and Keith, and me, and Kenny, we just sort of fall through em. We weren't never bad kids, we just didn't have nothing to hold on to, that's all. Ian Ayris

The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours, ' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted. Jonah Lehrer

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own — a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets. Sara Sheridan

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home. Anna Quindlen

I've started to hate this city, this country, all these STUPID FUCKING PEOPLE. Nick Bantock

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. Sara Sheridan

I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready. Tracey Emin

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

Cutting my roots and leaving my home and family when I was 18 years old forced me to build my home in other things, like my music, stories and my journey. The last years I have more or less constantly been on my way, on the road, always leaving and never arriving, which also means leaving people. I’ve loved and lost and I have regrets and I miss and no matter how many times you leave, start over, achieve success or travel places it’s other people that matter. People, friends, family, lovers, strangers — they will forever stay with you, even if only through memory. I’ve grown to appreciate people to the deepest core and I’m trying to learn how to tell people what I want to tell them when I have the chance, before it’s too late. … . Charlotte Eriksson

Because we know he was simply a man, with weakness and frailties. Who yearned for the same things all of us do--to love and be loved Kristen Callihan

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? Zadie Smith

Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use the rubble of the old to raise up the new ones. Tom Pollock

In my own shire, if I was sad Homely comforters I had: The earth, because my heart was sore, Sorrowed for the son she bore; And standing hills, long to remain, Shared their short-lived comrade's pain. And bound for the same bourn as I, On every road I wandered by, Trod beside me, close and dear, The beautiful and death-struck year: Whether in the woodland brown I heard the beechnut rustle down, And saw the purple crocus pale Flower about the autumn dale; Or littering far the fields of MayLady-smocks a-bleaching lay, And like a skylit water stood The bluebells in the azured wood. Yonder, lightening other loads, The season range the country roads, But here in London streets I ken No such helpmates, only men; And these are not in plight to bear, If they would, another's care. They have enough as 'tis: I see In many an eye that measures me The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind. Undone with misery, all they can Is to hate their fellow man; And till they drop they needs must still Look at you and wish you ill. A.E. Housman

Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance. E.m. Forster

It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she’d insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company. Sara Sheridan

London was one of the worst places to have a bad day and one of the best places to have a good day Mhairi McFarlane

Like most cities, London could be a lonely place... Kassandra Cross

For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die. Elizabeth Von Arnim

I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem. Watch me burn. Love always, Charlotte Charlotte Eriksson

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. It is all there in the books. Anna Quindlen

The wiry man scratched his head, looked the two inquisitors up and down and cleared his throat softly. “We must be quick.” He turned to go, pulling his cloak over his head and shuffling through the door into the moonlight. The two inquisitors moved with impossible silence behind, floating across the straw-covered floor like the cats on the walls outside the hut. The cats froze at the disturbance before scurrying noiselessly into the shadows as the three silhouettes crossed the ten yards of grass before the blackness of the forest swallowed them. No fires flickered at this time, when the full moon was highest in the cloudless summer sky, and the three were the only waking souls in the hamlet. Gregory Figg

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

It's elementary, my dear Winifred. Miss Mae

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. Emmanuelle De Maupassant

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. Emmanuelle De Maupassant

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. Craig Stone

While in England write or get wrought rotten rusted. Aporva Kala

Nowadays, people resort to all kinds of activities in order to calm themselves after a stressful event: performing yoga poses in a sauna, leaping off bridges while tied to a bungee, killing imaginary zombies with imaginary weapons, and so forth. But in Miss Penelope Lumley's day, it was universally understood that there is nothing like a nice cup of tea to settle one's nerves in the aftermath of an adventure- a practice many would find well worth reviving. Maryrose Wood

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. Beryl Markham

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. Bram Stoker

It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. Arthur Conan Doyle

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

London is not a good place to be when you are sad: so crowded it makes you feel lonely. Moe Cidaly

It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they might their pre-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon. I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky ; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered with that circular layer - abominable disc! - of oleaginous nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that surrounds the truffle bedecked pate  de  foie gras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine o'clock breakfasts. George Augustus Sala

I don't know what London's coming to – the higher the buildings the lower the morals. Unknown

London is one of the most fascinating, historic, amazing cities in the world! Sophie Kinsella

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now. Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeanother vagabond lost to love. Charlotte Eriksson

Day 72I remember oranges and you don’t mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you’re touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the cherry-ness of them. On days like this, I want to take my strangers home with me. Gemma Seltzer

My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music. Charlotte Eriksson

The fairies, as their custom, clapped their hands with delight over their cleverness, and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it. J.m. Barrie

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

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

Could I be brave enough to look lower? I could. His black tee shirt licked his hard body and I could only guess what was hidden underneath it. His faded jeans hung dangerously low, revealing a slice of his narrow hips, and I could easily imagine the rest. Jennifer Loiske

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. Sam Starbuck

I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London. Boris Johnson