London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

Henry James

Tags: life cities london city-life metropolis



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Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? [...]

This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various Briths broadhseets, Goofy.

They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.

Anna Quindlen

Tags: imagination truth fiction cities london clichés preconceptions reality-check literary-london fictional-london realiy



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London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.

Anna Quindlen

Tags: geography similes cities london literary-london metropolis urban-geography



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

Anna Quindlen

Tags: cities london city-life urban-geography



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It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

Anna Quindlen

Tags: life history cities london renewal city-life circle-of-life literary-london metropolis fictional-london



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Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.

And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Anna Quindlen

Tags: imagination life literature cities london literary-london metropolis fictional-london



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Heights plummeted because of a little disaster called civilization. "Heights go way down when we go into state society," says Bogin. "When Egypt conquered the Nile area, the height of peasants fell dramatically. They moved from having access to a wide variety of foods to growing what the Egyptian state demanded. Their bones show lots of deficiencies in minerals and iron." The same stunting happened repeatedly throughout history. As late as the 1800s, male Cheyenne Indians, who hunted bison and collected berries, averaged a whopping 5'10", towering above even today's Americans, not to mention General Custer's cavalry, which averaged 5'7", and the period's wealthy European monarchies.

Arianne Cohen

Tags: history cities height hunter-gatherer



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Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stations

We crossed cities that turn-tabled all day

And vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")

Pierre Albert-Birot

Tags: cities city trains train train-station electric-light



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Oh you dear companions

Electric bells of the stations song of the reapers

Butcher's sleigh regiment of unnumbered streets

Cavalry of bridges nights livid with alcohol

The cities I've seen lived like mad women

(The Voyager)

Pierre Albert-Birot

Tags: alcohol cities drunk city drunkeness



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...cities are murky places - hatching grounds for monsters...

John Geddes

Tags: darkness monsters cities murky



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