Quotes from Peter Ackroyd

The best years are when you know what you're doing.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.

Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.

To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.

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.

a lie, once uttered, changes reality just as surely as if it were a great truth.

I lack the World, for I move like a Ghost through it.

London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.

Destruction is like a snow-ball rolled down a Hill, for its Bulk encreases by its own swiftness and thus Disorder spreads.

I am the scourge of God

A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in 'The Battle of Maldon' where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered - 'Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less'. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.

I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time.

for who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?

The value is always in the eye of the beholder. What is worthless to one person may be very important to someone else.

I realized that my time in this place had come to an end; now that my schooldays were over, I no longer belonged here. I had always been a stranger and, if I stayed, I would become a stranger to myself as well.

he found it difficult to discuss any of his activities, which seemed to him no more than the hole through which he was falling.

I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable