Quotable London
"Do you begin to grasp how great a work is London? A veritable textbook we may draw upon in formulating great works of our own! We'll penetrate its metaphors, lay bare its structures and thus at last come upon its meaning. As befits great work, we'll read it carefully and with respect." William Gull as imagined by Alan Moore, From Hell
"I marked only the strange sights about me, and, though there was nothing there nearly so fantastic as I was myself, I reached the high-level station and train before realizing who it was that had aroused so much attention. ‘Twas no matter. This was London at last; the London of the picture-books, the London of the fairy tales; the London of dream and song, every roof a mystery and every chimney-pot enchanted. Away we sped above the dizziness of roof and chimney-pot, and whirling lanes and courts, through queer, foggy odors [sic]." – Hon. Henry Watterson, in Scenes from Every Land (1893), subtitled "a photographic tour of Europe and the world"
"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." - Samuel Johnson
"I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost." - V. S. Naipaul
"London is the only place in which the child grows completely up into the man." - William Hazlitt
"I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air - or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained." Dr. Watson, in A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"London loves... the way people just fall apart" - London Loves, Blur
"London calling to the faraway towns: now war is declared, and battle brought down" - London Calling, The Clash
"This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare" - Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by Wordsworth
"I have seen the greatest wonder which the world can show to the stonished spirit. I have seen it, and am more astonished than ever - and still there remains in my memory that stone forest of houses, and amid them the rushing stream of faces, of living human faces, with all their motley passions, all their terrible impulses of love, of hunger, and of hate." - Heinrich Heine
"What a city this would be to plunder!" - Gebhard von Blücher, Field Marshal of Prussia, 1742-1819
"London never sleeps, it just sucks
The life out of me, and the money in my pocket" Londinium, Catatonia
London
William Blake
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.