L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“London is like no other city I know in its ability to become beautiful. You can suddenly turn a corner and there are odd moments - of light, of weather.”
“London is like the grave in one respect -- any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.”
Source: The Complete Works of John Buchan (Unabridged): Thriller Classics, Spy Novels, Supernatural Tales, Short Stories, Poetry, Historical Works, The Great War Writings, Essays, Biographies & Memoirs – All in One Volume
“London is my favorite place in the world. I love London. I think it has the best of L.A. and New York in one, and I have a really great friend there.”
“London is my home... I know what's right and wrong here, and it's nice to have somewhere familiar to go back to.”
“London is often confused with England. The English also live in London but they are only one of the communities which inhabit a true world city.”
Source: Have Pen, Will Travel: Observations of a Globetrotter
“London is on the whole the most possible form of life.”
Source: The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The Authoritative and Definitive Edition
“London is one of my favourite places to come to overseas.”
“London is one of the few cities where people still dress properly and fashion exists. Every day I see women who've thought about their outfits. They've picked out the bag, put on proper shoes. ... Do you know how rare it is in parts of America to actually see 'an outfit'? France? I don't want to be anti-French but there isn't a more unattractive group of people on the streets.”
“London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.”
“London is one of the most enchanting places I've ever been on this planet.”
“London is one of the most exciting cities in the world with so many fantastic pubs and restaurants. I would urge people to get out there and see as much as possible.”
“London is one of the most fascinating, historic, amazing cities in the world!”
Source: Twenties Girl
“London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.”
“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.”
“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”
“London is the clearing-house of the world.”
“London is the most multicultural, mixed race place on Earth. And I love that. I grew up in a neighborhood in London where English wasn't necessarily the first language - maybe because of that, I love to travel. Every penny I've ever saved has been spent on airline tickets to different corners of the world. I think that's partly from growing up in London. I've taken that bit with me - this ability to fit in with any culture and be fascinated and respectful with any culture all started from growing up in London.”
“London is the most multicultural, mixed-race place on Earth.”
“London is the sporting capital of the world. I say to the Chinese and I say to the world, ping pong is coming home.”
“London keeps me grounded. We don't get praised every time we open our gobs there.”
“London late at night -- or even in the daytime, for that matter -- is no place for a man in scarlet tights.”
Source: Right Ho, Jeeves Illustrated
“London life was very full and exciting [...] But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.”
Source: Lolly Willowes: or, The loving huntsman
“London. “Look Olivier. Quite a sight isn’t it?” Commandant Auguste Angers stood tall in his stirrups as he pointed out the far distant dome of St. Paul’s. The bronzed roof of the cathedral was glistening in the sun during a brief break in the clouds. The commandant and his colleague and deputy, Captain Olivier Rougemont, had enjoyed a morning’s exhilarating ride in Richmond Park. The commandant was riding his favourite grey, Chloe, and Rougemont was on his boss’s second string, a chestnut Annette.”
Source: The French Spy
“London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.”
“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”
Source: Bleak House
“London now has its own John Grisham.”
“London on a gloomy and rainy day is still better than Paris on a bright and sunny day.”
“London on a gloomy and rainy day is still better than San Francisco on a bright and sunny day.”
“London on your own actually seems more exotic than Egypt on a tour.”
“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.”
“London owes everything to its press: it owes as much to its press as it does to its being the seat of government and the law.”
“London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.”
“London scene consists of mostly foreigners. We see ourselves as British in many ways, but not English.”
“London seems to be a town with a lot of comedy fans and people that really enjoy stand-up.”
“London
The Institute
Year of Our Lord 1878
“Mother, Father, my chwaer fach,
It’s my seventeenth birthday today. I know that to write to you is to break the law, I know that I will likely tear this letter into pieces when it is finished. As I have done on all my birthdays past since I was twelve. But I write anyway, to commemorate the occasion - the way some make yearly pilgrimages to a grave, to remember the death of a loved one. For are we not dead to each other?
I wonder if when you woke this morning you remembered that today, seventeen years ago, you had a son? I wonder if you think of me and imagine my life here in the Institute in London? I doubt you could imagine it. It is so very different from our house surrounded by mountains, and the great clear blue sky and the endless green. Here, everything is black and gray and brown, and the sunsets are painted in smoke and blood. I wonder if you worry that I am lonely or, as Mother always used to, that I am cold, that I have gone out into the rain again without a hat? No one here worries about those details. There are so many things that could kill us at any moment; catching a chill hardly seems important.
I wonder if you knew that I could hear you that day you came for me, when I was twelve. I crawled under the bed to block out the sound of you crying my name, but I heard you. I heard mother call for her fach, her little one. I bit my hands until they bled but I did not come down. And, eventually, Charlotte convinced you to go away. I thought you might come again but you never did. Herondales are stubborn like that.
I remember the great sighs of relief you would both give each time the Council came to ask me if I wished to join the Nephilim and leave my family, and each time I said no and I send them away. I wonder if you knew I was tempted by the idea of a life of glory, of fighting, of killing to protect as a man should. It is in our blood - the call to the seraph and the stele, to marks and to monsters.
I wonder why you left the Nephilim, Father? I wonder why Mother chose not to Ascend and to become a Shadowhunter? Is it because you found them cruel or cold? I have no fathom side. Charlotte, especially, is kind to me, little knowing how much I do not deserve it. Henry is mad as a brush, but a good man. He would have made Ella laugh. There is little good to be said about Jessamine, but she is harmless. As little as there is good to say about her, there is as much good to say about Jem: He is the brother Father always thought I should have. Blood of my blood - though we are no relation. Though I might have lost everything else, at least I have gained one thing in his friendship.
And we have a new addition to our household too. Her name is Tessa. A pretty name, is it not? When the clouds used to roll over the mountains from the ocean? That gray is the color of her eyes.
And now I will tell you a terrible truth, since I never intend to send this letter. I came here to the Institute because I had nowhere else to go. I did not expect it to ever be home, but in the time I have been here I have discovered that I am a true Shadowhunter. In some way my blood tells me that this is what I was born to do.If only I had known before and gone with the Clave the first time they asked me, perhaps I could have saved Ella’s life. Perhaps I could have saved my own.
Your Son,
Will”
Source: Clockwork Prince
“London underground took me on a tour of all the hidden places, the disused shafts and staircases... that was very interesting.”
“London used to be reasonably priced, clean, and a decent place to live. These days it's polluted and utterly unbearable”
“London was a real dump in the 70s, when it belonged to me and my friends, because, like most cities, you kind of hand them off. You're in charge for a bit and then you don't go out anymore. You say, "Oh god, it's going to be too crowded."”
“London was a really multi-racial city ... It's incredible how comfortable people are with race there.”
“London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air. Leonard hurried through her tinted wonders, very much part of the picture. His was a grey life, and to brighten it he had ruled off a few corners for romance.”
Source: Howards End
“London was like that too. It was that time of year when all the rich kids with the oil money have their cars shipped over. Some of the most beautiful cars I've ever seen - with the worst paint jobs! It was just this hilarious, disgusting display of wealth. The shamelessness of it. To be that shameless about your money when you're a guest in a country was astounding to me. But I saw the humor in it.”
“London was littered with social clubs and houses of chance, but Malfeasance was not just any gaming hell. It was located in the most notorious part of London and, Graydon had heard, was run by a pariah Djinn named Malphas.”
Source: Shadow's End
“London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.”
“London was one of the few Institutes that hadn't emptied yet. Apparently Sebastian and his forces tried to attack. They were rebuffed by some kind of protection spell, something even the Council didn't know about. Something that warned the Shadowhunters what was coming and led them to safety.'
'A ghost,' Magnus said. A smile hovered around his mouth. 'A spirit, sworn to protect the place. She's been there for a hundred and thirty years.'
'She?' Jocelyn said, leaning back against a dusty wall. 'A ghost? Really? What was her name?'
'You would recognize her last name, if I told it to you, but she wouldn't like that.' Magnus's gaze was faraway. 'I hope this means she's found peace.”
Source: City of Heavenly Fire
“London was one of the worst places to have a bad day and one of the best places to have a good day”
Source: Here's Looking at You
“London! the needy villain's general home, The common sewer of Paris and of Rome! With eager thirst, by folly or by fate, Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state.”
Source: The poetical works of Samuel Johnson: collated with the best editions
“London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.”
“London's like a black-browed brute that gets an unholy influence over you.”
Source: The Woman with the Fan
“London's like a forest ... we shall be lost in it.”