Top 22 Literary London Quotes
#1. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.
Anna Quindlen
#2. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#3. It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#4. In rapid succession we passed through the fringe of fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial London, and, finally, maritime London
Arthur Conan Doyle
#5. Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.
Chris Kraus
#6. To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation.
Albert Camus
#7. For the same reason people watch action movies or game shows, I guess. Mindless entertainment. Not everything has to be Shakespeare, you know. Or Oscar Wilde. It's fun. Like... gilded porn.
Summer Olsen
#8. I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'
Daniel Woodrell
#9. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
#10. Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell. On returning to London, Virginia suffered
a severe, suicidal breakdown.
Jane Goldman
#11. I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.
Jules Verne
#12. Clutter is not just physical stuff. It's old ideas, toxic relationships and bad habits. Clutter is anything that does not support your better self.
Eleanor Brown
#13. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)
James Wood
#14. London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
#15. I was only curious. What do I care? At least he's not Salvadoran.
Jenn Bennett
#16. We may think at times that the only thing life offers us tomorrow, is to repeat everything we did today. But if we pay close attention, we will see that no two days are alike.
Paulo Coelho
#18. London opens to you like a novel itself. [ ... ] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
Anna Quindlen
#19. I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#20. My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm [Kushner, Rachel, Diary, London Review of Books, January 14, 2015].
Rachel Kushner
#21. If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Colin Wilson
#22. Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
Robert Frost
