200 Quotes by Peter Ackroyd

He felt at peace only in the hour before dawn, when the darkness seemed to give way slowly to a mist, and it was at this hour that he would wake and sit by his window.

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver'd of a Child without a Head. So lives the Power of Imagination even in this Rationall Age.

DYER. (Sits down) There was nothing that I recall save that the Sunne was a Round flat shining Disc and the Thunder was a Noise from a Drum or a Pan. VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What a Child is this! (To Dyer) These are only our Devices, and are like the Paint of our Painted Age.DYER. But in Meditation the Sunne is a vast and glorious Body, and Thunder is the most forcible and terrible Phaenomenon: it is not to be mocked, for the highest Passion is Terrour.

The English seem to relish unsystematic learning of this kind, in the same manner that they embarked upon "Grand Tours" of Europe in pursuit of a peripatetic scholarship.

So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.

And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get insidea book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wantedto be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed infor ever.

The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon