London Quotes - Page 3

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeanother vagabond lost to love.

Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

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.

The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it.

The sad fact is, there are 7.220.400.641 people on the planet, but right now I haven't got a single one to talk to.

Cos there's holes in this world,see. Holes. And the likes of Thommo, and Keith, and me, and Kenny, we just sort of fall through em. We weren't never bad kids, we just didn't have nothing to hold on to, that's all.

If you aren’t paranoid before you arrive in this city, give it a few weeks and you will soon notice it creeping in, dripping into your subconscious like a leaky tap. The trick is not to give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about you, and if you are in the right frame of mind this can be an easy trick to perform but if not you’ll soon notice that for a city full of people who do a great Stevie Wonder impersonation when it comes to the homeless and beggars and casual violence towards others, wearing the wrong kind of shoes or a cheap suit brings out a sneering, hateful attitude that can have weaker minded individuals locked in their houses for weeks before harassing their doctors for prescriptions of Prozac and Beta blockers just to make it out the front door.

They say that life is just a blank chain, and precious moments are the beads we hang off it to make it beautiful.

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

Novelists,’ said Ivo, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels any more, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist – as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think,’ said Ivo, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.

It was a bad night to be about with such a feeling in one's heart. The rain was cold, pitiless and increasing. A damp, keen wind blew down the cross streets leading from the river. The fumes of the gas works seemed to fall with the rain. The roadway was muddy; the pavement greasy; the lamps burned dimly; and that dreary district of London looked its very gloomiest and worst.("The Old House In Vauxhall Road")

I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definition of beauty and success like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, for no one saw what I saw, or felt the same as I did, and so I wanted to keep to myself. You hide to protect yourself.