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You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

Peter Ackroyd

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Peter Ackroyd
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Biographer
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
London
England
People
Truly
Speak
Sense
House
Place
Grand
Past
Territory
Certain
Speaks
Believe
Brought

More quotes by Peter Ackroyd

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I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.
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No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
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London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
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I wanted to be a poet when I was 20 I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
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The best years are when you know what you're doing.
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I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.
Peter Ackroyd
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I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.
Peter Ackroyd
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It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.
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I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.
Peter Ackroyd
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London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.
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He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.
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The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
Peter Ackroyd
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I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
Peter Ackroyd
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Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.
Peter Ackroyd
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People are much more interesting than people realise.
Peter Ackroyd
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There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.
Peter Ackroyd
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London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.
Peter Ackroyd
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It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.
Peter Ackroyd
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Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
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It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?
Peter Ackroyd