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Quotes About London

To conclude: having staid near four mouths in Hamburgh, I came from thence over land to the Hague, where I embarked in the packet, and arrived in London the tenth of January 1705, having been gone from England ten years and nine months.
~ Daniel Defoe
The face of London was now indeed strangely altered:
~ Daniel Defoe
yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger. Were it possible to represent those times exactly to those that did not see them, and give the reader due ideas of the horror that everywhere presented itself, it must make just impressions upon their minds, and fill them with surprise. London might well be said to be all in tears.
~ Daniel Defoe
above all the parishes in London, for a great number of alleys and thoroughfares, very long, into which no carts could come, and where they were obliged to go and fetch the bodies a very long way, which alleys now remain to witness it; such as White's Alley, Cross Keys Court, Swan Alley, Bell Alley, White Horse Alley, and many more.
~ Daniel Defoe
though it is true all the people did not go out of the city of London, yet I may venture to say that in a manner all the horses did; for there was hardly a horse to be bought or hired in the whole city for some weeks.
~ Daniel Defoe
companions being going by sea to London, in
~ Daniel Defoe
Sexiness is about confidence and individuality. I can't keep my eyes off the women you see in cities like London, New York and Paris – the way they carry themselves and put themselves together are always so unique.
~ Christina Hendricks
So Harry Potter came in and it is nice that I have kids of the right age. I took them to London and they walked around the set and met Harry Potter and that is thrilling.
~ Gary Oldman
Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm—I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience—I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca.
~ Wilkie Collins
The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother's cottage.
~ Wilkie Collins
Collins wrote a dramatic version of The Woman in White that made its London debut at the Olympic Theatre on October 9, 1871. It ran on Broadway for three weeks in 1873.
~ Wilkie Collins
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
Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you will find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.
~ William Dalrymple
That was before you guys turned up, the new hoodoo team. I knew this street samurai got a job working for a Special Forces type made the Wig look flat fucking normal. Her and this cowboy they'd scraped up out of Chiba, they were on to something like that. Maybe they found it. Istanbul was the last I saw of 'em. Heard she lived in London, once, a few years ago. Who the fuck knows?
~ William Gibson
That annoying thing that tourists did, opening a feed into London's sea of blue plaques.
~ William Gibson
London," Bobby said. "She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought they wouldn't have anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They've been fading, sort of blurring. You can still raise em, sometimes, but their personalities run together.…
~ William Gibson
Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City's meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same.
~ William Gibson
When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.
~ William Gibson
BERLIN, June 18 It's in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain's. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.
~ William L. Shirer
And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city's alchemists whine like dogs—was provoking more and more interest from London's repo-men and -women.
~ China Mieville
London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where.
~ China Mieville
London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once - the urgent and the always - each in earshot of the other.
~ Chris Cleave
I do not think I can just pretend it is okay." "Well if you can't pretend in London, where can you pretend?" He sniffed, and put on a pair of sunglasses, and waved his hand at the street. "I mean look," he said. "There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization.
~ Chris Cleave
London is a city built on the wreckage of itself Osama. It's had more comebacks that The Evil Dead. It's been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners jut took a deep breath and put the kettle on. Then the whole thing burned down. Every last stick of it. ... People thought it was the end of the world. BUt the Londoners got up the next day and the world hadn't ended so they rebuilt the city in 3 years stronger and taller.
~ Chris Cleave