“I gave way to a wave of home-sickness that almost shames me now when I recollect it. I find it impossible in cold blood, and at this distance, to put into words the longing that shook me. I have forgotten the pain in the neck, but never will I forget the pain in my heart.””
“Women are marvellous at plodding throughthe 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.””
“What an amazing thing is the coming of spring to London. The very pavements seem ready to crack and lift under the denied earth; in the air is a consciousness of life which tells you that if traffic stopped for a fortnight grass would grow again in Piccadilly and corn would spring in pavement cracks where a horse had spilt his 'feed'. And the squares of London, so dingy and black since the first October gale, fill week by week with the rising tide of life, just as the sea, running up the creeks and pushing itself forward inch by inch towards the land, comes at last to each remote rock pool.””
“There comes a moment in all travel when you know that you have really started. It may be weeks before you start or weeks after you have started; it is a spiritual emotion, a turning towards the future with an eager heart...””
“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 was a British journalist and travel writer known for his vivid and engaging prose that captured the essence of his journeys. Born in 1892, he began his career as a journalist, contributin...
“Advertisements at 1 a.m. are nauseating.””
“All good knights, pilgrims, sons in search of fortune, seekers after truth, and plain ordinary fools, turn towards the city they have left and take farewell according to their nature. This is a full moment in all journeying, the time when girths are tightened in preparation for the miles that lie ahead.””
“Those who today explore the curious ramifications of the Sultan’s Palace at Istanbul may fancy, not without reason, that they see the only reflection left on earth of the once crowded Roman Palatine.””
“It was now, I realized almost with a shock, October; perhaps the most beautiful month of the year in Rome. The trees had changed into a hundred shades of red and gold. Sometimes an unearthly pearly light washed the city, sharp and clear like a spring morning on the Acropolis, and in the evening that curious pinkish flush in the streets, which lasts only from dusk to darkness, seemed to be accentuated. Masses of splendid fat grapes, black and white, filled the street stalls. They reminded me that Bacchic revels made respectable by church processions”
“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.””