2d34e01
|
And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
3ffb239
|
The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
946aeae
|
I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.
|
|
time-passing
|
Peter Ackroyd |
1c8263b
|
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
463b8a9
|
The best years are when you know what you're doing.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
d4b3d87
|
Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
d942329
|
There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
f2bb019
|
The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
07826f7
|
The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
b4f18fb
|
It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
8b67325
|
He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
e3d5dd6
|
Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne? And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt. Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not? And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more.
|
|
time
history
dust
london
|
Peter Ackroyd |
e783b7b
|
For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Rea..
|
|
time
history
writer
reader
|
Peter Ackroyd |
7e2835f
|
Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.
|
|
cosmopolitanism
openmindedness
free-trade
|
Peter Ackroyd |
8377050
|
a lie, once uttered, changes reality just as surely as if it were a great truth.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
81f63b5
|
To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.
|
|
loneliness
independence
|
Peter Ackroyd |
98382d5
|
I lack the World, for I move like a Ghost through it.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
2c9ce06
|
I am the scourge of God
|
|
insanity
obsession
|
Peter Ackroyd |
4c978c8
|
His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to pity, and its own particular movements which he tried hard to follow. He had learned from it how to keep his eyes down on the road, so that he could see no one, and how important it was never to look back - although there were times when memories of an earlier life filled him with grief and he lay face down upon the grass until th..
|
|
homeless-people
vagrant
homelessness
mental-illness
|
Peter Ackroyd |
f2b6957
|
Destruction is like a snow-ball rolled down a Hill, for its Bulk encreases by its own swiftness and thus Disorder spreads.
|
|
riot
disorder
|
Peter Ackroyd |
92facf9
|
I realized that my time in this place had come to an end; now that my schooldays were over, I no longer belonged here. I had always been a stranger and, if I stayed, I would become a stranger to myself as well.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
26fba7e
|
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 |
51ca820
|
A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
b4876e6
|
I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
88767c6
|
So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world, interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
6078e70
|
There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.
|
|
inspirational
|
Peter Ackroyd |
9524137
|
History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh ..
|
|
history
england
|
Peter Ackroyd |
89e375a
|
None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
8d97100
|
sorrow was always the bedfellow of depravity.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
d7ef0d9
|
The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.
|
|
literature
music
|
Peter Ackroyd |
1ac643b
|
Books do not perish like humankind. Of course we commonly see them broken in the haberdasher's shop when only a few months before they lay bound on the stationer's stall; these are not true works, but mere trash and newfangleness for the vulgar. There are thousands of such gewgaws and toys which people have in their chambers, or which they keep upon their shelves, believing that they are precious things, when they are the mere passing folli..
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
6a7e3ee
|
It is the kind of stoicism which had been seen as characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in 'The Battle of Maldon' where the most famous Saxon or English cry has been rendered - 'Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less'. That combination of bravery and fatalism, endurance and understatement, is the defining mood of Arhurian legend.
|
|
england
king-arthur
|
Peter Ackroyd |
ca9b83e
|
He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He conceived several ideas all at once, and sometimes forgot to separate them into their component parts. This was true of his lectures, too, i..
|
|
poetry
turner
language
|
Peter Ackroyd |
904b304
|
So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
8286b39
|
By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So ..
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
aff78f9
|
I believe now that there can be no real sense of loss or seperation without the recognition of death; we were too young to consider any such eventuality, and simply moved on with our lives into some indefinite but illimitable future.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
eb00ee1
|
Time. In another time. Either before or after. They were not stars, but fires. They were the souls of birds. They were entries into the vast fire. They were the eyes of the dead. And in the darkness they were imprisoned by them.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
4da5a30
|
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 |
3f3a113
|
And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?). I..
|
|
light
darkness
occult
substance
shadow
night
|
Peter Ackroyd |
6e3331a
|
There were some places, and streets, where he did not venture since he had learnt that others had claims there greater than his own - not the gangs of meths drinkers who lived in no place and no time, nor the growing number of the young who moved on restlessly across the face of the city, but vagrants like himself who, despite the name which the world has given them, had ceased to wander and now associated themselves with one territory or '..
|
|
greenwich
homeless-people
limehouse
spitalfields
vagrant
wapping
homelessness
homeless
whitechapel
london
|
Peter Ackroyd |
328a009
|
There was no grandeur here, no sublimity, only weariness and gloom.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
33a061e
|
Then as we passed down this Passage we were knocked against certain Women of the Town, who gave us Eye-language, since there were many Corners and Closets in Bedlam where they would stop and wait for Custom: indeed it was known as a sure Market for Lechers and Loiterers, for tho' they came in Single they went out by Pairs. This is a Showing-room for Whores, I said. And what better place for Lust, Sir Chris. replied, than among those whose W..
|
|
bedlam
prostitution
lust
|
Peter Ackroyd |
f8aff63
|
The house of the Plantagenets, from Henry II to Richard III himself, was brimming with blood. In their lust for power the members of the family turned upon one another. King John murdered, or caused to be murdered, his nephew Arthur; Richard II despatched his uncle, Thomas of Gloucester; Richard II was in turn killed on the orders of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke; Henry VI was killed in the Tower on the orders of his cousin, Edward IV; Edwa..
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |
3bb271a
|
Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money.
|
|
|
Peter Ackroyd |