In Search of London Quotes

“Women are marvellous at plodding through
the centuries. They are exact, accurate and tireless. If you ever wish to discover some minute fact, buried away at the bottom of a bin of forgotten parchments, find a girl with horn-rimmed spectacles and straight hair and ask her to do it for you.”
― H.V. Morton, In Search Of London

“What, I have often asked myself, really constitutes the charm of London, that something about London which satisfies you as only Rome does, that queer, disturbing vision of bridges, spires, towers and crowded streets which comes to you at moments when you are far away and brings with it as much pain as pleasure? The answer is to be found in history. Behind everything in London is something else, and, behind that, is something else still; and so on through the centuries, so that London as we see her is only the latest manifestation of other Londons, and to love her is to plunge into ancestor-worship. London is a place where millions of people have been living and dying for a very long time on the same plot of earth, drenching it with their blood, glorifying it with their nobility or degrading it with their villainy, pulling it down and building it up, generation after generation, yet never destroying the vision of an earlier day.”
― H.V. Morton, In Search of London

“It was easy for complacent centuries like the Nineteenth, which knew no overwhelming disasters, to say that the Great Fire was a blessing because it swept out of existence a vast conglomeration of insanitary streets and made way for the cleaner brick-and-stone London of Stuart and later times; but we of to-day, who have seen so much that we loved go up in flames, are probably in a better position to feel sympathy for those of our forebears who suffered the tragedy of the Great Fire.”
― H.V. Morton, In Search of London

“Advertisements at 1 a.m. are nauseating.”
― H.V. Morton, In Search of London