For years I have lived in the flats, rooms and garrets of this city, the drawers in the human filing-cabinets… — Laurie Lee
For years I have lived in the flats, rooms and garrets of this city, the drawers in the human filing-cabinets that stand in blank rows down the streets of Kensington and Notting Hill. Yet when I talk of home I think of that damp green valley near Stroud where I was brought up. The boys I went to school with have long since grown and fattened, got married and gone bald, and they would probably have to give me a very long look before they recognized me if I turned up there again. But that is my home, and the image of it the day I left it is still more real to me than long years in this crowded capital city.
p. 43Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don't know the pleasure of being hungry any more.
p. 65
Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance round the significance of the last thing she said, the need to see her to have life confirmed.
p. 57
Of course, there is one great virtue in size; and of course, London is the greatest show on earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together in one place. Here, in a day, you can see the world. Stand at the entrance to a main-line railway station, during the rush-hour, and you see every possible human species scurrying past. One becomes amazed and transported by the multiplicity of the human face, by its infinite differences, by its almost prismatic graduations from ugliness to beauty, evil to good.
p. 45
