L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“London audiences have this reputation for being a bit too cool for school.”
“London changes because of money. It's real estate. If they can build some offices or expensive apartments they will, it's money that changes everything in a city.”
“London clubland divides itself between the St James's refuge for toffs, and the Conquest of Cool, for the arts and media.”
“London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, offers the range of subjects that help young designers to arrange the underpinnings that are necessary to get from zero to 10. The hardest part is the beginning, understanding your passion and making the decision that whatever it takes, that's what you're going to do. London College of Fashion shows them what they must do and helps them to find their goal.”
“London, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent's epithet more appropriate) of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the distinguished author is dying - slowly, but surely. In Flanders, less than two hundred miles away, other men are dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully - young men, mostly, with their lives still before them, blank pages that will never be filled. The author is seventy-two. He has had an interesting and varied life, written many books, travelled widely, enjoyed the arts, moved in society (one winter he dined out 107 times), and owns a charming old house in Rye as well as the lease of this spacious London flat with its fine view of the Thames. He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they hoped to marry and were keeping themselves chaste on principle.”
Source: Author, Author
“London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of "Blow Up" and "Performance" and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.”
“London Fashion Week is so different from any of the others. Compared to the strictness in New York, London seems freer from commercial constraints. Truer to the process, to street style, to a sense of humour.”
“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.”
“London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.”
Source: Neverwhere: A Novel
“London had always been different. There is the old saying that Britain is ten years behind America, and the country as a whole is ten years behind London. If you have a Mayor of London working for jobs and growth and strong businesses, that is going to create opportunities for businesses and people in Burnley or Hull and places all over the UK.”
“London had been different. Everyone had been constantly moving, their eyes focused elsewhere, pretending no one around them existed.”
Source: Chainbreaker
“London has always been a haven for victims of cruelty, and been improved by them. Yet I can see it changing now. Outsiders are demonised, there are little bits of legislation, people are scared.”
“London has always been open to trade, people, ideas. We have to keep that. I want to compete not just with New York, Paris, Berlin... the ten fastest growing cities in the world are in China. How do we compete with them? We have to attract investment and we have to compete on skills.”
“London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.”
“London has become really boring. I mean, years ago, London was really happening - there was swinging London and then punk. It was really different from other cities, and so I'd always wanted to go there and see what was actually going on. After that, hip-hop was the next thing happening, so to get the records or the proper clothing, you really had to actually go to New York. But now you don't really need to go.”
“London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.”
“London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.”
“London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really.”
“London has now become almost like a gigantic frog! With its long tongue it draws curious insects from all over the world inside itself!”
“London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith... Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.
Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a in a green dress in a square. ‘It has flowered,’ the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o'clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“London has the advantage of one of the most gloomy atmospheres in the world.”
Source: Views Afoot; Or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff
“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.”
Source: Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
“London has what it takes to host the greatest sporting show on earth [on the 2012 Olympic bid”
“London
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 Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”
Source: Songs of Innocence and of Experience
“London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.”
“London is a bad habit one hates to lose.”
Source: Blue Skies, Brown Studies
“London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member.”
Source: The Sugar Islands: A Collection of Pieces Written About the West Indies Between 1928 and 1953
“London is a city that offers all kinds of temptations, and whenever I go for a walk I discover things that I would like to bring back as souvenirs. But my resources are very limited. I cannot buy anything, and I make a point of taking my walks a good distance from these riches.”
Source: Spring Miscellany: And London Essays
“London is a city that sleeps too much. This is the mould of its quality. A magnetic contract: to reinvent itself on the other side of dream, each day. And such dreams, smouldering against the tidal spine of the river, telling and retelling the tales that must be told to manifest a city's bones. Whispering the night architecture back into stone.”
Source: London: City of Disappearances
“London is a dead duck, as far as innovative new music is concerned, unless you want to have your head blown off with some outrageous, rubbish, pounding dance music.”
“London is a fantastic creator of jobs - but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country.”
“London is a good fashion city. They're a little more daring. There's the element of the aristocracy, which is always interesting.”
“London is a great city full of amazing people from all backgrounds and when Londoners face adversity, we always pull together. We stand up for our values. And we show the world. We are the greatest city in the world.”
“London is a huge shop, with a hotel on the upper storeys.”
Source: New Grub Street
“London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there.”
“London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.”
Source: London: The Biography
“London is a modern Babylon.”
“London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.”
“London is a roost for every bird.”
Source: Lothair
“London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.”
“London is a very energising place to be.”
“London is always fun, obviously, but something about Glasgow really speaks to me. Usually what it says, though, is "Let's get wasted."”
“London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.”
“London is full of creative people - you can never say that it's not.”
“London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.”
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan; Salome; A Woman of No Importance; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Earnest
“London is like a cold dark dream sometimes.”
Source: Wide Sargasso Sea
“London is like a collection of hills. There are lots of desirable spots and lots of space in between. The idea of elbowing people out of your way to get somewhere - literally or metaphorically - seems foreign here.”
“London is like a dream come true. As I ramble through it I am haunted by the curious feeling of something half-forgotten, but still dimly remembered, like a reminiscence of some previous state of existence. It is at once familiar and strange.”
Source: Preaching in London: A Diary of Anglo-American Friendship
“London is like a girlfriend I loved, then really fell out with.”
“London is like a woman with too many years to encourage confession.”
Source: We Discover New England