Quotes & Sayings About North England

The Conservative party absolutely must not allow itself to be shut out of parts of the north of England. — George Osborne

He is more circus master than either composer or pop star. He is the frontman of one of Britain's best-loved bands of all time, co-creator of the world's most successful virtual band and the creative force behind records, operas and loose-fit projects that evoke not just England but Africa, north and sub-Saharan, China, the Middle East and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, America. Like all pop and rock stars who manage to maintain a level of success over numerous generations, Albarn seems to need change to survive. — Dylan Moore

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained portrait of one man's exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies' translationdoes the original justice. — Hisham Matar

Today finds Scotland in an extraordinary muddle. First she was free in body, romantic, cultured, and uncivilised, till her government was taken over by a usurious Kirk, weilding power through superstition. The boor for a century, she was repopularised by Scott, adopted as a plaything by a foreign queen, suffered worse than any nation in the industrial upheaval, and finally left an abortive carcase rotting somewhere to the North of England. — George Scott-Moncrieff

Some species moved north faster than others; when Europeans arrived in New England, earthworms had not yet returned. As the ice sheets withdrew, large chunks of ice broke off and were left behind. When these chunks melted, they left behind water-filled depressions in the ground called kettlehole ponds. Oakland Lake, near the north end of Springfield Boulevard in Queens, is one of these kettlehole ponds. The ice sheets also dropped boulders they'd picked up on their journey; some of these rocks, called glacial erratics, can be found in Central Park today. — Randall Munroe

I grew up in the North of England at a time when Stirling Moss was a hero. Everyone wanted to be a racing driver. — Ridley Scott

I still like being in North of England and I keep a place there. But there are a lot of things about the Continent that are to be preferred. The social institutions work better, women have a better position in society and the food is another thing. — Andrew Eldritch

Henry sailed from England in July of 1776. The stated objectives of Cook's third expedition were twofold. The first was to sail to Tahiti, to return Sir Joseph Banks's pet - the man named Omai - to his homeland. Omai had grown tired of court life and now longed to return home. He had become sulky and fat and difficult, and Banks had grown tired of his pet. The second task was to then sail north, all the way up the Pacific coast of the Americas, in search of a Northwest Passage. — Elizabeth Gilbert

It was in the beginning of the month of November, 17
, when a young English gentleman, who had just left the university of Oxford, made use of the liberty afforded him, to visit some parts of the north of England; and curiosity extended his tour into the adjacent frontier of the sister country. — Walter Scott

The very sight of a daffodil still makes me shiver, because spring in the north of England is always so bitter. — Bea Davenport

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected. — Barry Unsworth

She had lovely eyes - an odd, green-blue shade - and a really dirty, likeable smile. She was gorgeous, even with her hair scraped back and wearing that horrible overall thing in a nineteen-fifties blue check - Actually, she was gorgeous because of that. She was just an ordinary gorgeous working girl in a crap job in a small town in the north of England and that broke Given's heart, because he longed to be ordinary. He'd love to date a girl like that. — Michael Tyne

It is said, that in Holland Interest is lower than in England. — Dudley North

We then took a shortened version of what we'd been doing in the pubs, with the best gags and things like that, out to cabaret clubs and things in the north of England for six weeks. And we became a big success. — Neil Innes

It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. — James F. Cooper

So," he throttled shift knob into fifth gear half a block from a stop sign, "you're from Great Britain."

"Yes. England. The North. Sheffield."

"Why you guys drive on the left?"

"Obviously, because it's right."

"I'm being serious."

"Are you?"

"I'm askin, aren't I?"

"I don't know. Tradition, I suppose."

"That's a dumb-ass reason."

"Then perhaps you should start driving on the left. — Kevin Cole

Henry O. Sturges, born in England, March 2nd, 1563. Landed at Roanoke, July 27th, 1587. Friend to the American Revolution, present at the Battles of Trenton and Yorktown, staunch supporter of the North in its hour of need, adviser to presidents, a decorated soldier who distinguished himself in the trenches of the Great War, and member of the Union Brotherhood - a collective of vampires dedicated to preserving the freedom of man and his dominion over the earth. — Seth Grahame-Smith

The village of Gretna Green lay in the county of Dumfriesshire, just north of the border between England and Scotland. In defiance of the strict marriage laws of England, hundreds of couples had traveled the coaching road from London, through Carlisle, to Gretna Green. They came on foot, by carriage or horseback, seeking an asylum, where they could say their marriage vows and return to England as man and wife. — Lisa Kleypas

This is the whistle-stop memoir of how a lower-middle-class girl from the north of England one day changed the way she lived her life and set off on a bumpy path that ultimately led her to her own slice of the happily-ever-after pie. — Tillie Cole

Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. — Althea Gibson

When she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire — William Faulkner

I was doing a play in New York, which we had done in New Haven, Connecticut. It was an American premiere of a play called The Changing Room written by a wonderful man named David Story. It was about a rugby team in the North of England. It got just screaming rave reviews. At that time, virtually every major critic went up to the Long Wharf Theater to see a new play like that. — Richard Masur

Most people in England don't live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South. — Mick Jagger

Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury. — Roger Bannister

Stephen Morillo, one of the leading military historians of Anglo-Norman England, rejected the "great man" approach in his introduction to a series of extracts and articles on the Battle of Hastings. Noting that William had benefited from a contrary wind that delayed his attack until Harold Godwineson had been drawn north by a threat from a third claimant, Harald Hardrada of Norway, Morillo invoked the idea of chaos theory, which describes how small, even random, factors can sometimes have a huge effect on larger systems. Drawing on the quip of another scholar, John Gillingham, he wondered if William, who was sometimes called William the Bastard, due to his illegitimate birth, ought really to be known as William the Lucky Bastard.2 — Hugh M. Thomas

I was born in Bradford, a city in the north of England that God forgot about. A place where most people never leave, but if they do, they certainly never go back. — Natalia Kills

he attended a Buddhist retreat in the north of England at which the principal teachers were a small group of Buddhist nuns. He no longer remembers any details about the tradition they belonged to, but he remembers well the profound effect their teachings had on him. At the core of the retreat were instructions on how participants could develop a practice of meditation through using the breath as a focus to remain anchored in the present moment. "What the nuns pointed me to was the part of their tradition kept alive through monastic practice for 2,500 years," he says. "This was the importance of staying in the present moment, the importance of calm abiding, the practice of concentration in Buddhism known as samatha." This time spent in the company of nuns, listening to their guidance, was "a seminal moment. — Christine Toomey

I think we would look at other possibilities that would deliver further passenger capacity, that would deliver further infrastructure to the north of England but would be better value for taxpayers. — Andrea Leadsom

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity? — E. M. Forster

In my judgment, if we had pursued this course, the zones would have been of short duration. England would have been compelled to take her mines out of the North Sea in order to get any supplies from our country. — George William Norris

I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show. — Tom Riley

I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground. — Sarah Hall

Over-taxation cost England her colonies of North America. — Edmund Burke

I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. — Jamaica Kincaid

London and the south-east of England are very crowded spaces. Wherever a new runway is placed, thousands will be affected. Residents in nearby Longford, Harmondsworth and Sipson, which lie to the north of Heathrow, face having their homes compulsorily purchased for land to build the new runway. — Tim Bowler

It's like aversion therapy. You keep doing scenes over and over again with three women in the bed with you, and we had to do them all in one week. Three girls would step out and another three girls would step into the bed.It sounds like a fantasy but by the end of it, I just wanted to go for a hike on my own in the north of England, in the hills. Because it became a sort of "be careful what you wish for" kinda thing. — Steve Coogan

The paradox, though, was already evident: that the more solidly the foundations of an English state were cemented together, so the harder did it become to present the island as a single realm. Seen in this light, Athelstan's conquest of York, the feat which had first served to project the power of the West Saxon monarchy deep into the north of Britain, can be seen as the decisive event in the making of Scotland as well as of England. There — Tom Holland

If England had not used the services of privateers and pirates during its long struggle with Spain, there is some likelihood that people today in North America would be speaking Spanish rather than English. — Robert Earl Lee

In the South of England northerners were regarded then as uncouth, brutish, undisciplined savages ... — Alison Weir

I started writing 'Brick Lane' when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing. — Monica Ali

Odo in fact owed his first acquaintance with the French writers to Alfieri, who, in the intervals of his wandering over Europe, now and then reappeared in Turin laden with the latest novelties in Transalpine literature and haberdashery. What his eccentric friend failed to provide, Odo had little difficulty in obtaining for himself; for though most of the new writers were on the Index, and the Sardinian censorship was notoriously severe, there was never yet a barrier that could keep out books, and Cantapresto was a skilled purveyor of contraband dainties. Odo had thus acquainted himself with the lighter literature of England and France; and though he had read but few philosophical treatises, was yet dimly aware of the new standpoint from which, north of the Alps, men were beginning to test the accepted forms of thought. The — Edith Wharton

Ridley and I talk every day. Our family is very close because we're from North England. — Tony Scott

Because I was a kid from north of England, the only films I had access to was not alternative cinema, which in those days would be foreign cinema; I would be looking at all the Hollywood movies that arrived at my High Street. — Ridley Scott

I've actually, very rarely have I worked in my own voice. I've played, I think, Russian, American, Northern from the North of England. All sorts of different accents I've worked in. — Ben Barnes

Democratic periodicals in the North warned that the governor's stance would compromise highly profitable New York trade connections with Virginia and other slave states. Seward was branded "a bigoted New England fanatic." This only emboldened Seward's resolve to press the issue. He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension of fugitive slaves. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

My dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so — Jane Austen

Hunting was the labour of the savages of North America, but the amusement of the gentlemen of England. — Samuel Johnson

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old. — Richard Dawkins

Israel was thinking of warm beer, and muffins, and Wensleydale cheese, and Wallace and Gromit, and the music of Elgar, and the Clash, and the Beatles, and Jarvis Cocker, and the white cliffs of Dover, and Big Bend, and the West End, and Stonehenge, and Alton Towers, and the Last Night of the Proms, and Glastonbury, and William Hogarth, and William Blake, and Just William, and Winston Churchill, and the North Circular Road, and Grodzinski's for coffee, and rubbish, and potholes, and a slice of Stilton and a pickled onion, and George Orwell. And Gloria, of course. He was almost home to Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A. — Ian Sansom

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there. — David Bowie

You have been here before.

The highway winding north through dark New England forests. White dunes towering above the sides of the road, looking like the moon.

You can come back. Even after you hurt each other too deeply to comprehend. Even after the impossible becomes just that. Too far out of reach even to dream.

Love remembers the places where it touched down, left an invisible trail on your bodies. Follow it back. You can follow it back to them. — Kate Scelsa

Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up ... Theater of all sorts. — Ian McKellen

Together, cotton and slavery would ensure that there would be no war. Since southerners did not want an armed conflict, it could only come as a result of northern aggression. But northerners would be insane to attempt to challenge the South militarily. Alexander Stephens, soon to become Vice-President of the Confederacy, was not an ardent secessionist. But he struck the same note as the most extreme secessionist when he declared that there was "not a flourishing village or hamlet in the North, to say nothing of their towns and cities, that does not owe its prosperity to Southern cotton". Moreover "England, with her millions of people and billions upon billions of pounds sterling, could not survive six months without it". — John Ashworth

My worst job ever, this was when I was a kid, was picking potatoes on the back of a trailer in March. It was freezing, absolutely freezing. We had to sort the good ones from the bad ones. Once you do that for a day in March in the north of England, it makes you think there must be better jobs than this! — Ben Miles

The amusement she had drawn from their disapproval was a slavish remnant, a derisive dance on the north bank of the Ohio. There was no question of forgiving them. She had not, in any case, a forgiving nature; and the injury they had done her was not done by them. If she were to start forgiving she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great-aunt Salome and her prayer-book, the Bank of England, Prostitution, the Architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilization. All she could do was to go on forgetting them. But now she was able to forget them without flouting them by her forgetfulness. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England. — Mark Twain

People who talk of the spread of music in England and the increasing love of it, rarely seem to know where the growth of the art is really strong and properly fostered: some day the press will awake to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North. — Edward Elgar

It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour. It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest. England is certainly, in the present times, a much richer country than any part of North America. The wages of labour, however, are much higher in North America than in any part of England. — Adam Smith

My mother was a housewife. Both from - well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class. — David Bowie

This was a really amazing part of your adventure, Hamlet. You're sure that, should you ever one day write a book about this story or perhaps a stage production, you'd DEFINITELY include this scene. Why, you'd have to be literally crazy to write a story where you journey to England, get attacked by pirates - actual pirates! - but then just sum up that whole adventure in a single sentence. Hah! That'd be the worst. Who puts a pirate-attack scene in their story and doesn't show it to the audience? Hopefully nobody, that's who! Even from a purely structural viewpoint, you've got to give the audience something awesome to make up for all the introspection you've been doing; that just seems pretty obvious is all. — Ryan North

From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity. — John Galt

Manchester is in the south of the north of England.
Its spirit has a contrariness in it
a south and north bound up together
at once untamed and unmetropolitan; at the same time, connected and wordly. — Jeanette Winterson

He told me I didn't understand, that we were from the bleak industrial wastes of North England, or something, and that we didn't understand the Internet. I told him Fall fans invented the Internet. They were on there in 1982. — Mark E. Smith

The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it ... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury. — Zadie Smith

I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales. — Philip Pullman

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap. — Jeanette Winterson

Machines are the opium of the masses. If all the machines in England were thrown into the North Sea tomorrow, we should be back in the Garden of Eden. And the weather would probably improve. — Helen Cresswell

You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'
Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.
Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Of large fortune from the north of England; that he came — Jane Austen

The American Rebellion," about our founding fathers. Not till their foes were driven forth By England o'er the main - Not till the Frenchman from the North Had gone with shattered Spain; Not till the clean-swept oceans showed No hostile flag unrolled, Did they remember that they owed To Freedom - and were bold! — P. J. O'Rourke

There is a huge antipathy in England between the north and the south, the working class and the owning class. — Bill Vaughan

I grew up looking at ... going to the movies a lot, as much as they'd let you. I grew up in Manchester in the north of England in the '40s and '50s. I saw a lot of movies. They were all Hollywood and British movies. I didn't see a film that wasn't in English until I was 17 when I went to London to be a student. — Mike Leigh

My father got a job at Bradford University in textiles. And he came for - I guess, you know, why do people immigrate? - like, for a better life to find, you know, a new world. And, you know, I think he always - he saw it as an opportunity. And so yeah so we came to this coal mining town in the north of England and that's where I grew up. — Aasif Mandvi

The criminals at the North make us sell our wheat and cotton to Europe at cheap prices, but will not permit us to buy our manufactures cheaply from England. No, they pass a high tariff, keep out cheap European products and force us to buy from Massachusetts and New York at extremely high prices. — James A. Michener

In England if something goes wrong
say, if one finds a skunk in the garden
he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift. — Alfred North Whitehead

Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England. — Charlotte Bronte