City and Everyday Life

Let us go then, you and I,

The dead level of provincial existence.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

‘It’s always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.’ ‘But suppose there are two mobs?’ suggested Mr Snodgrass. ‘Shout with the largest,’ replied Mr Pickwick.

A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.

John Gilpin was a citizen

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs:

There was a sound of revelry by night.

STREETS FLOODED. PLEASE ADVISE. message sent on arriving in Venice

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on.

Every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open.

Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?

One has no great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

The sooner every party breaks up the better.

Private faces in public places

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark, The beggars are coming to town; Some in rags, some in tags, And some in velvet gowns.

The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, Heigho! the derry oh, the farmer in the dell.

The pump don’t work ’Cause the vandals took the handles.

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille Day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me