Underground Tube Quotes & Sayings

I love a mysterious underground and have exploited this in many of my books: the ice tunnels of Greenland, the volcanic tubes of Iceland, the mysterious passageways beneath an ancient African hillside or a Buddhist monastery in central China. And of course, London's famous tube system, setting for my book LONDON UNDERGROUND. It's a funny sort of fixation, especially given my mother's claustrophobia, which I saw her deal with on many occasions. We once lined up to take a tour into the Lascaux Caverns in France to see the ancient cave paintings. My mother didn't make it past the first quirky turn into the depths, and she sent me on by myself. Given her interest in history and archaeology, which she used as the basis for a series of mysteries she published and which inspired my own writing, it always surprised me she still loved to write about places she could never visit. — Chris Angus

When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map, that elegant multicolored topographical display of underground railway lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of the city above. It was like belonging to a political party, he thought once, proudly, and then, having tried to explain the resemblance between the Tube map and politics, at a party, to a cluster of bewildered strangers, he had decided in the future to leave political comment to others. — Neil Gaiman

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

London has always been a warren underground, and Pall Mall is no exception: secret passageways, Tube tunnels, sewers, cellars, more of London under- than above-ground. — Lavie Tidhar