London Quotes

“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.”
― Peter Ackroyd, London

“lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their solitary rooms.”
― Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

“It might be compared to some organism which sloughs off its old skin, or texture, in order to live again. It is a city which has the ability to dance upon its own ashes.”
― Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

“Yet, of course, and more especially, the executioners themselves became notorious. The first known public hangman was one Bull, who was followed by the more celebrated Derrick. “And Derrick must be his host,” Dekker wrote of a horse-thief in his Bellman of London (1608), “and Tiburne the land at which he will light.” There was a proverb—“If Derrick’s cables do but hold”—which referred to an ingenious structure, like a crane, upon which twenty-three condemned could be hanged together. This device was then put in more general use for unloading and hoisting vessels on board ships, and still bears the executioner’s name.”
― Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

“If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean.”
― Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

“When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.”
― Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

“Barely a decade after its foundation a great fire of London utterly destroyed its buildings. In AD 60 Boudicca and her tribal army laid waste the city with flame and sword, wreaking vengeance upon those who were trying to sell the women and children of the Iceni as slaves. It is the first token of the city’s appetite for human lives. The evidence of Boudicca’s destruction is to be found in a red level of oxidised iron among a layer of burnt clay, wood and ash. Red is London’s colour, a sign of fire and devastation.”
― Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography