#london

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#criminals #detectives #intellect #london #sherlock-holmes

It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children. ↗

— J.M. Barrie

#children #fairies #fairy #fantasy #imagination

JESSICA: When did you last go to London? HUGH: When I read a Dickens novel. That was when I resolved never to travel there. ↗

— Bauvard

#britain #dickens #funny #humor #london

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. ↗

— George Orwell

#bookshops #humor #london #lunatics #madness

The fairies, as their custom, clapped their hands with delight over their cleverness, and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it. ↗

— J.M. Barrie

#fairies #finish #hands #happy #house

For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record. ↗

— Gillian Tindall

#landscape #local-history #london #dating

The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#city-life #london #urban-geography #imagination

Day 72 I remember oranges and you don’t mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you’re touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the cherry-ness of them. On days like this, I want to take my strangers home with me. ↗

— Gemma Seltzer

#london #oranges #speaking #stories #strangers

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. ↗

— Dorothy Parker

#home #hometown #new-york-city #new-yorker #optimism

There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. “There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere—it doesn’t all get used up at once.” “I may still be hung over,” sighed Richard. “That almost made sense. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#london