The Lonely Londoners Quotes

“It was a summer night: laughter fell softly: it was the sort of night that if you wasn't making love to a woman you feel like you was the only person in the world like that”
― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“It ain't have no place in the world that exactly like a place where a lot of men get together to look for work and draw money from the Welfare State while they ain't working. Is a kind of place where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up. Is a place where everyone is your enemy and your friend.”
― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Always, from the first time he went there to see Eros and the lights, that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world. Every time he go there, he have the same feeling like when he see it the first night, drink coca-cola, any time is guinness time, bovril and the fireworks, a million flashing lights, gay laughter, the wide doors of theatres, the huge posters, everready batteries, rich people going into tall hotels, people going to the theatre, people sitting and standing and walking and talking and laughing and buses and cars and Galahad Esquire, in all this, standing there in the big city, in London. Oh Lord.”
― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Is a kind of place where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up. Is a place where everyone is your enemy and your friend.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Piccadilly Circus- that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don't hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“It had a fellar call Five Past Twelve. A test look at him and say, 'Boy, you black like midnight.' Then the test take a second look and say, 'No, you more like Five Past Twelve.”
― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds, the falling leaves, sunlight on green grass, snow on the land, London particular. Oh what it is and where it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: ‘I walked on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Piccadilly Circus is my playground,’ to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world. To one day lean against the wind walking up the Bayswater Road (destination unknown), to see the leaves swirl and dance and spin on the pavement (sight unseeing), to write a casual letter home beginning: ‘Last night, in Trafalgar Square …”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Harris is a fellar who like to play ladeda, and he like English customs and thing, he does be polite and say thank you and he does get up in the bus and the tube to let woman sit down, which is a thing even them Englishmen don’t do. And when he dress, you think is some Englishman going to work in the city, bowler and umbrella, and briefcase tuck under the arm, with The Times fold up in the pocket so the name would show, and he walking upright like if is he alone who alive in the world. Only thing, Harris face black.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“But big headlines in the papers every day, and whatever the newspaper and the radio say in this country, that's the people Bible.”
― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Sometimes the words freeze and you have to melt it to hear the talk.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“People in this world don't know how other people does affect their lives.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“So, cool as a lord, the old Galahad walking out to the road, with plastic raincoat hanging on the arm, and the eyes not missing one sharp craft that pass, bowing his head in a polite 'Good evening' and not giving a blast if they answer or not. This is London, this is life oh lord, to walk like a king with money in your pocket, not a worry in the world.”
― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Is one of those summer evenings, when it look like night would never come, a magnificent evening, a powerful evening, rent finish paying, rations in the cupboard, twenty pounds in the bank, and a nice piece of skin waiting under the big clock in Piccadilly Tube Station. The sky blue, sun shining, the girls ain't have on no coats to hide the legs.

"Mummy, look at that black man!" A little child, holding on to the mother hand, look up at Sir Galahad.

"You mustn't say that, dear!" The mother chide the child.”
― Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Every year he vowing to go back to Trinidad, but after the winter gone and birds sing and all the trees begin to put on leaves again and flowers come and now and then the old sun shining, is as if life start all over again, as if it still have time, as if it still have another chance. I will wait until after the summer, the summer does really be hearts.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“oh lord Galahad say when the sweetness of summer get him he say he would never leave the old Brit'n as long as he live and Moses sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who frighten as the years go by wondering what is it all about.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Always, from the first time he went there to see Eros and the lights, that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is beginning and the ending of the world. Every time he go there, he have the same feeling like when he see it the first night, drink coca-cola, any time is guinness time, bovril and the fireworks, a million flashing lights, gay laughter, the wide doors of theatres, the huge posters, everready batteries, rich people going into tall hotels, people going to the theatre, people sitting and standing and walking and talking and laughing and buses and cars and Galahad Esquire, in all this, standing there in the big city, in London. Oh Lord.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Now Moses don't know a damn thing about Jamaica - Moses come from Trinidad, which is a thousand miles from Jamaica, but the English people believe that everybody who come from the West Indies come from Jamaica.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

“Lord, what is it we people do in this world that we have to suffer so? What it is we want that the white people and them find it so hard to give? A little work, a little food, a little place to sleep. We not asking for the sun, or the moon. We only want to get by, we don't even want to get on.”
― Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners