London Bombing Quotes & Sayings

During the intensive rocket bombing of London in World War II, it was generally believed that the bombing could not be random because a map of the hits revealed conspicuous gaps. Some suspected that German spies were located in the unharmed areas. A careful statistical analysis revealed that the distribution of hits was typical of a random process - and typical as well in evoking a strong impression that it was not random. "To the untrained eye," Feller remarks, "randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster. — Daniel Kahneman

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

When you want something, all the Universe conspires to helping you achieve it.
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Just ask.. — Victoria Aldridge Washuk

I've always been fascinated with Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, having lived in London in the '80s when there was an Irish republican bombing campaign there. — John Gordon Sinclair

And a ton came down on a coloured road,
And a ton came down on a gaol,
And a ton came down on a freckled girl,
And a ton on the black canal,
And a ton came down on a hospital,
And a ton on a manuscript,
And a ton shot up through the dome of a church,
And a ton roared down to the crypt.
And a ton danced over the Thames and filled
A thousand panes with stars,
And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shore
To the tune of a thousand scars. — Mervyn Peake

By the time I auditioned for 'Aliens in America,' the July 7 bombing had happened in London. So I'd had those experiences where I would get onto the Tube, and people would get off. So there was a lot about Raja that I understood. — Adhir Kalyan

As the weather improved, the bobms got worse. The newspapers said that the Kaiser was aiming to knock London down (although avoiding Buckingham Palace, so as not to hit his relations). — Kate Williams

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right. — Ian McEwan

Markets rebounded quickly from morning jitters after the London Thursday terrorist bombing. — Cliff Stearns

He didn't give a damn for the defeatist Kennedy, or indeed for that stuffed-shirt Chamberlain, whom Hitler had comprehensively hoodwinked. Nothing should stand in the way of a murder investigation, however lowly the victim. No doubt Joan's fate would seem unimportant in the greater scheme of things whenever the Luftwaffe got round to bombing London, but that was nothing to him. It was his job to seek out the truth behind her death, regardless. — Mark Ellis

In the earliest days of World War II when London was undergoing the blitz but the United States had not yet been drawn into the hostilities, the US ambassador walked the streets during the hottest of the bombing and ask people at every level of British society what he could do to help. What a picture of our role as ambassadors of Christ's coming Kingdom! — Lynne Olson

People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . "It's the glass," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle." ... An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in - a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck."

The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new. — John Steinbeck

I was born on the first day of January 1941 in the front bedroom of my grandparents' house in Rodborough near Stroud in Gloucestershire where my mother had come to escape the bombing in London. — Martin Evans

Then one woman looked directly at her husband. "Is our place gone?"
"I'm afraid so, girl," he said. "There isn't much left up there. But we're alive. We're all lucky to be alive. We'd have been dead if we'd stayed up above."
"Oh, what a mercy we didn't!" she exclaimed. "How lucky we are!"
Incredible though it sounds, within a few moments, a whole lot of people were congratulating each other on their extraordinary good fortune in only having lost all their worldy posessions. — Ida Cook