#lot

I love London. I love everything about it. I love its palaces and its museums and its galleries, sure. But also, I love its filth, and damp, and stink. Okay, well, I don’t mean love, exactly. But I don’t mind it. Not any more. Not now I’m used to it. You don’t mind anything once you’re used to it. Not the graffiti you find on your door the week after you painted over it, or the chicken bones and cider cans you have to move before you can sit down for your damp and muddy picnic. Not the everchanging fast food joints – AbraKebabra to Pizza the Action to Really Fried Chicken – and all on a high street that despite its three new names a week never seems to look any different. Its tawdriness can be comforting, its wilfulness inspiring. It’s the London I see every day. I mean, tourists: they see the Dorchester. They see Harrods, and they see men in bearskins and Carnaby Street. They very rarely see the Happy Shopper on the Mile End Road, or a drab Peckham disco. They head for Buckingham Palace, and see waving above it the red, white and blue, while the rest of us order dansak from the Tandoori Palace, and see Simply Red, White Lightning, and Duncan from Blue. But we should be proud of that, too. Or, at least, get used to it. ↗

— Danny Wallace

#danny-wallace #london #food

I have no objection whatever to your representing me as a little eccentric, since you and your learned friends would have it so; only don't set me on in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs off chairs, and tearing my wife's silk gowns... Had I been numbered amongst the calm, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should in all probability never have had such children as mine have been. ↗

— Patrick Brontë

#bronte #charlotte-bronte #emily-bronte #men

When I shop, the world gets better, and the world is better, but then it's not, and I need to do it again. (Confessions of a Shopaholic-the movie) ↗

— Sophie Kinsella

#better #clothes #money #shop #shopping

Heads are so overdressed in their natural state, it is offensive not to wear a hat to cover them up. The policy of removing hats in public buildings is extremely irreverent. We should just have guillotines at the door instead and spare everyone the awkwardness of having to look each other in the brow. ↗

— Bauvard

#guillotine #hats #heads #humor #irreverent

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#plot #parenting

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#zealotry #religion

The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts Its click Creates perpetual motion ("The Head") ↗

— Blaise Cendrars

#decapitation #guillotine #perpetual-motion #art

Anyway, there is one thing I have learned and that is not to dress uncomfortably, in styles which hurt: winklepicker shoes that cripple your feet and tight pants that squash your balls. Indian clothes are better. ↗

— George Harrison

#beatles #clothes #comfort #style

I give you a week, maybe two, before you're driven to bite someone." "I don't know how to... to bite or drink! But you could teach me." "And what could you possibly do in return?" Lothaire waved a negligent hand. "Play football for me? Break in my jeans really well? ↗

— Kresley Cole

#berserker #declan-chase #dreams-of-a-dark-warrior #immortals-after-dark #kresley-cole

Is this the part where you start tearing off strips of your shirt to bind my wounds?" "If you wanted me to rip my clothes off, you should have just asked. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#clothes #jace #wounds #want