London City Quotes & Sayings

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded. — Danny Boyle

Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? [ ... ]
This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various Briths broadhseets, Goofy.
They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways. — Anna Quindlen

Cities depend on a healthy mix of uses and people for their vitality. As a pre-eminent world city, London is a magnet to people from across the globe. — Richard Rogers

Though I work in New York City, in an office about a mile from the World Trade Center, I was not in New York City when the planes struck. I was on a plane above the Atlantic Ocean, heading back to New York from a family reunion and celebration in Europe. I had said good-bye to my husband in London; he was staying for a wedding of a business friend. I couldn't wait to see my kids and my parents, who would be waiting for me at a Little League game in our town, about thirty-five miles from New York City. An hour and a half into the flight, I suddenly had the feeling that the plane was making a slow turn. Nobody else seemed to notice. I sat nervously, hoping I was imagining it. But then a stewardess made an announcement. "There has been a catastrophic event affecting all of North American airspace," she said. "We are returning — Lauren Tarshis

Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head. — Orson Welles

London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs. — Louis Kronenberger

The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of an enemy. — Sigmund Freud

New York City has fantastic restaurants and, unlike London, a lot of the best restaurants are relatively cheap. — Tibor Fischer

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

The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis. — Henry Mayhew

The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted. — Gary Inbinder

It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody — John Lanchesterter

Friendship evangelism is great, but it does not enable the gospel to travel beyond our social networks, unless there are intentional attempts to build friendships with people who are not like us. John Mark Hobbins of London City Mission says, 'Many people live in networks which take precedence over their address, and many churches have grown because of this. But the reality for many people living in social housing or in cheaper housing is that their address is very likely to define their daily life. — Tim Chester

London is a good fashion city. They're a little more daring. There's the element of the aristocracy, which is always interesting. — John Legend

The sixteen hundred dairies in California's Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that's more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined. — Gene Baur

Avery fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together? In a word,'tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted. — Daniel Defoe

I can't get enough of London! I love all the picnic benches, the old-school phone booths and parks in the middle of the city. — Jessica Lowndes

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

We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop 's tongs - we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology. — Peter Porter

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell! — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

It is possible that the city of London was initially named for ravens or a raven-deity. According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, the designation comes from "Londinium," a Romanized version of an earlier Celtic name. But the word closely resembles "Lugdunum," the Roman name for both the city of Lyon in France and Leiden in the Netherlands. That Roman name, in turn, was derived from the Celtic "Lugdon," which meant, literally, "hill, or town, of the god Lugh" or, alternatively, " ... of ravens." The site of Lyon was initially chosen for a town when a flock of ravens, avatars of the god, settled there. Whether or not "Lugdunum" was the origin of "London," ravens were important for inhabitants of Britain for both practical and religious reasons. — Boria Sax

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman. — John Berger

In 1843, after annexing the Indian province of Sind, British General Sir Charles Napier sent home a one word telegram, "Peccavi" implying "I have Sind..."

(Napier was under explicit instructions that:
1. He was not to attack Hyderabad.
2. If provoked to fighting, he was under no conditions take Hyderabad's
capital -- Sind.
He then (according to the story) send the one word message Peccavi to London and of course all the recipients understood that he had violated his order and taken the city - the old British boy school Latin training... — Charles Napier

If you visit London, you'll occasionally cross paths with young men (and less often women) on motor scooters, blithely darting in and out of traffic while studying maps affixed to their handlebars. These studious cyclists are training to become London cabdrivers. Before they can receive accreditation from London's Public Carriage Office, cabbies-in-training must spend two to four years memorizing the locations and traffic patterns of all 25,000 streets in the vast and vastly confusing city, as well as the locations of 1,400 landmarks. Their training culminates in an infamously daunting exam called "the Knowledge," in which they not only have to plot the shortest route between any two points in the metropolitan area, but also name important places of interest along the way. Only about three out of ten people who train for the Knowledge obtain certification. — Joshua Foer

The first time I've actually filmed in London, the locations we've all had have been real inner city, grimy urban places which has been great. Filming here, you've got everything on your doorstep, so when you've got time off, you can go into town, so I've really enjoyed it. — Jonas Armstrong

When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common. — Julie Burchill

I thought living in London, my favorite city, would be wonderful, but I worried about the impact the move would have on my career. I discussed my options with Bill Setterstrom of the bank's personnel department. Bill had been in the navy and viewed family separations as fairly normal. At first, he suggested that I stay at my job in New York. I pointed out that Pat was not being assigned to a battleship at sea where I could not follow. "In fact," I said, "this is London, Bill, and I want to go!"
In the end, he offered me six months' leave of absence "to enjoy your new baby and living in London. — Mary Robertson

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub. — C. Wright Mills

Mostly, though, he made people laugh, with wicked impersonations of everyone around him: clients, lawyers, clerks, even the cleaning woman. When Pickwick Papers came out, his former colleagues realized that half of them had turned up in its pages. His eyes - eyes that everyone who ever met him, to the day he died, remarked on - beautiful, animated, warm, dreamy, flashing, sparkling - though no two people ever agreed on their colour - were they grey, green, blue, brown? - those eyes missed nothing, any more than did his ears. He could imitate anyone. Brimming over with an all but uncontainable energy, which the twenty-first century might suspiciously describe as manic, he discharged his superplus of vitality by incessantly walking the streets, learning London as he went, mastering it, memorizing the names of the roads, the local accents, noting the characteristic topographies of the many villages of which the city still consisted. — Simon Callow

For London, Blampied claimed, was of all cities in the world the most autumnal - its mellow brickwork harmonizing with fallen leaves and October sunsets, just as the etched grays of November composed themselves with the light and shade of Portland stone. There was a charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, "The nights are drawing in," as if it were a spell to invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter. — James Hilton

On westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century. — Graham Moore

The city reeked of death, and the savages that resided within its imposing starkness existed in fear of their lives. They had been shocked by the recent bloody Whitechapel murders, as if starvation, disease, moral degradation, and perpetual smog drowning all color in gray wasn't enough to bring home the pathetic reality of their miserable existence. The police were no nearer to capturing the monster that lurked in the crevices, and London seemed stiller in the dark, the streets devoid of hope. — Carol Oates

He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough — Will Self

var person = {name: "John", surname: "Smith", address: { street: "13 Duncannon Street", city: "London", country: "United Kingdom" }}; — Andrea Chiarelli

long. Trade has always traveled and the world has always traded. Ours, though, is the era of extreme interdependence. Hardly any nation is now self-sufficient. In 2011, the United Kingdom shipped in half of its gas. The United States relies on ships to bring in two-thirds of its oil supplies. Every day, thirty-eight million tons of crude oil sets off by sea somewhere, although you may not notice it. As in Los Angeles, New York, and other port cities, London has moved its working docks out of the city, away from residents. Ships are bigger now and need deeper harbors, so they call at Newark or Tilbury or Felixstowe, not Liverpool or South Street. — Rose George

I spend a lot of time in L.A., and I think it would probably be easier if I lived there work wise, but there's no city like London, there is so much going on. I can jump on the Tube and be anywhere in 20 minutes, and all my friends and family are here and I'm not prepared to give that up. — Jeremy Irvine

Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their — Gary Shteyngart

I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other. — Ben Schott

The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia was a financial symptom of the renewed reality: In fact, it was the first round the world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That marked the beginnings of the return back 360 degrees around the world of the world economic center to Asia where it had always been before those two eighty-year period of temporary Western ascendance. The stock market crash in Hong Kong and the devaluation of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupia took only 80 seconds to make themselves felt in the London City and on New York's Wall Street. How much of a cultural lag do we still need for popular perception and social theory to catch up with global reality? — Andre Gunder Frank

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

It is very difficult to say nowadays where the suburbs of London come to an end and where the country begins. The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country have turned the countryside into a city. — Anthony Trollope

Hell is a city much like London A populous and smoky city — Percy Bysshe Shelley

A strange thing happened to me as I walked away from Jane's house
I was finally thinking clearly. I could see what Charlotte meant. Jane knew how to fix people. Now that I'd talked through some of my issues, I'd blown out the dust and garbage out of my brain and I could think for once. I could smell the rain, heavy with iron. The cold woke me, but it didn't sting. My breath puffed out in front of me in a great white plume, and I laughed. It was like I was breathing ghosts. I wasn't in the land of long highways and big box stores and humid, endless summers. I was in London, a city of stone and rain and magic. I understood, for instance, why they liked red so much. The red buses, telephone booths, and postboxes were a violent shock against the grays of the sky and stone. Red was blood and beating hearts.
And I was strong. — Maureen Johnson

It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price all good places have to pay. — Neil Gaiman

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing. — Neil Gaiman

London is not a city, London is a person. Tower Bridge talks to you; National Gallery reads a poem for you; Hyde Park dances with you; Palace of Westminster plays the piano; Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral sing an opera! London is not a city; it is a talented artist who is ready to contact with you directly! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions, such as London and Cambridge, and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London. — Evan Davis

If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet — Jess Walter

I do hate the City of London! It is the only thing which ever comes between us. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I mean, electric shock? Isn't that a bit ... electric shock-y? — Emmett Spain

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds. — P.D. James

My family love living in London. It is a fantastic city and a city such as this deserves to host the Olympic Games. — Jose Mourinho

I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city. — Doris Lessing

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

I want London to be the most cycle-friendly city on Earth, and I want more people to be happy and safe on bicycles. — Boris Johnson

London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale. — John Lanchester

I was born on a pig farm in Norfolk. We grew up in the city called Norwich in Norfolk, then I moved to London when I was thirteen. — Beth Orton

Even in this globalised world, London is still the standard for our times. The city has embraced the world's diversity and represents the finest in human achievements. — Narendra Modi

Provided that the City of London remains, as it is at present, the clearing-house of the world, any other nation may be its workshop. — Joseph Chamberlain

The City of London has never been known for understanding technology and has never matched Silicon Valley's tradition of knowledgeable investment in technology start-ups, just as the U.K. government has never matched the vast investment made by the U.S. government. — Geoff Mulgan

Growing up as a city kid is a joyous time! — Theophilus London

Intense sunlight rained down on a half-submerged city. Waves crashed between buildings that stood like waterlogged tombstones. Skyscrapers of smashed glass and twisted rusting metal jutted from the churning swell as islands of broken dreams. A familiar tower with a familiar clock face ... Big Ben. London stared back at Blue. What was left of it. A sea-drowned cemetery for a time and a place long dead. — Kev Heritage

We can talk about Manchester! I like coming here, it's a wicked city. It's my second favourite city in England after London. I like Liverpool too but there's a lot more to do in Manchester. — Dave Mason

London was a really multi-racial city ... It's incredible how comfortable people are with race there. — Sade Adu

From the top of the bus she could see the vast bowl of London spreading out to the horizon: splendid shops with mannequins in the window, interesting people and already a much bigger world. — Julia Gregson

It's hard for it to make a mark in this city because London has so much culture to offer. — Toby Jones

If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations. — Willa Cather

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again. — Emma Jane Unsworth

On my Instagram, I'm always keeping a record of things being pulled down in Soho and shutters being closed. Every city - and London more than anywhere - has got to be a vibrant mix of all different things. We can't allow it to become a monoculture. — Marc Almond

This was London, after all. I had read somewhere that wherever you stand in the entire city, you're never more than twenty yards from a rat. There were 50 million of them. That was like seven rats per human. — Amanda Gefter

London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member. — Alec Waugh

When you reach England, if you come to London, pass through it quickly, for I do not at all like that city. All sorts of men crowd together there from every country under the heavens. Each race brings its own vices and its own customs to the city. No-one lives in it without falling into some sort of crime. Every quarter of it abounds in grave obscenities. The greater a rascal a man is, the better a man he is accounted. I know whom I am instructing. You have a warmth of character beyond your years, and a coolness of memory; and from these contrary qualities arises a temperateness of reasoning. I fear nothing for you, unless you live with evil companions, for manners are formed by association. — Richard Of Devizes

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

The real power is not corporate; it is private. They choose not to have a name. It is a dynasty of banking families - Rothschild and Rockefeller being two - that operate chiefly out of London, in the boardrooms out of the city of London and the Bank of England, which they own. — Betty Dodson

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

The most thrilling day of the year, the first real day of Spring had enclosed its warm delicious beauty even to London eyes. It had put a spangle in every colour and a new tone in every voice, and city folks walked as though they carried real bodies under their clothes with real live hearts pumping the still blood through. — Katherine Mansfield

London is the most important city in the world for restaurants. — Alain Ducasse

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south. — Martin Cruz Smith

I believe that London is the most exciting food city in Europe. — Wolfgang Puck

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

More passengers fly in and out of London than any other city in the world. We are well-connected, we have ample capacity, and we are starting from a position of strength. The problem is that we don't use that capacity well. — Zac Goldsmith

Behold now this vast city [London]; a city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with His protection. — John Milton

I don't think there is a sound UK bank now, at least, if there is one I don't know about it. The City of London is finished, the financial centre of the world is moving east. All the money is in Asia. Why would it go back to the West? You don't need London. — Jim Rogers

She smiled. Her skin looked whiter than he recalled, and dark spidery veins were beginning to show beneath its surface. Her hair was still the color of spun silver and her eyes were still green as a cat's. She was still beautiful. Looking at her, he was in London again. He saw the gaslight and smelled the smoke and dirt and horses, the metallic tang of fog, the flowers in Kew Gardens. He saw a boy with black hair and blue eyes like Alec's, heard violin music like the sound of silver water. He saw a girl with long brown hair and a serious face. In a world where everything went away from him eventually, she was one of the few remaining constants.
And then there was Camille. — Cassandra Clare

Do you think now and then, now or then, in the whirl
Of the city, while London is new,
Of the hut in the Bush, and the freckled-faced girl
Who is eating her heart out for you? — Henry Lawson

In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo. — Simon McBurney

From my bedroom window, I can see the sun peeping through the clouds. London certainly isn't a city noted for its climate, but I think, sooner or later, you get used to it, and live with the weather. For most of the year, everyone and everything seems to be tucked up cosily in grey cotton wool, but Dickens said that fog is a characteristic of London, didn't he? This climate could go hand in hand with my dismal humour. — Sarah Iles

There is no conflict between best in British class and being a global newspaper. We are an international newspaper rooted in the City of London, and I think people understand that. The 'FT' stands out as a global niche product. — Lionel Barber

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other. — Alain De Botton

London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others.
Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was ... at the extreme. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night.
A city where the dead could stay lost a long time — Mark Billingham

Stockholm is unique in that it's built on islands and surrounded by water, so you get this enormous sense of freedom. It's got everything you could possibly need - everything New York or London has but without all the people and traffic. It's also become a very creative city, not only for music but also for fashion and computer games. — Bjorn Ulvaeus

If I were a place, the area of South Bank, in London. Between the Hayward Gallery, National Theatre and all other activities, I'm never bored. I would also say New York for the breathtaking skyline formed by the buildings and the fast pace of the city, whatever the time of day. — Robert Pattinson

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. — James Weldon Johnson

Well do I remember a friend of mine telling me once--he was then a labourer in the field of literature, who had not yet begun to earn his penny a day, though he worked hard--telling me how once, when a hope that had kept him active for months was suddenly quenched--a book refused on which he had spent a passion of labour--the weight of money that must be paid and could not be had, pressing him down like the coffin-lid that had lately covered the ONLY friend to whom he could have applied confidently for aid--telling me, I say, how he stood at the corner of a London street, with the rain, dripping black from the brim of his hat, the dreariest of atmospheres about him in the closing afternoon of the City, when the rich men were going home, and the poor men who worked for them were longing to follow; and how across this waste came energy and hope into his bosom, swelling thenceforth with courage to fight, and yield no ear to suggested failure. And — George MacDonald

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. — David Mitchell

I grew up in a middle class English family just outside London. I wasn't surrounded by that speedy city lifestyle, it was a little mellower. — Ed Westwick

It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth. — Anna Quindlen

I think if you live in London, it's such a cosmopolitan city; nobody even notices different-race relationships. I assumed it would be even more liberal in the States, and it's totally the opposite. — Alex Kingston

I've been doing nineteen hours a day on London, nothing else, I mean this has been my whole life, and writing has been put on one side, and if I'm privileged enough to be the Mayor of this city, then I will not write again. — Jeffrey Archer