manchester tourist guide manchester in quotes
Monday, 28th July 2003
Manchester in quotesThroughout the ages visitors have been intrigued or bemused by the city and its population. They have never found it a comfortable place. It is an edgy, bolshy and radical city with ideas of its own.
I still have to gaze upon the Cathedral... - or for that matter, upon Marx and Engel's old rendezvous in Chetham's. But I have sailed in a narrow boat, heard one of the world's great orchestras playing Stravinsky and drunk the cheapest ale in Britain. Can a man ask for more?
The Scotsman, 1998.
If you see someone in Manchester with a tan. Don't believe it. They've just gone rusty.
Elderly resident explaining the weather to foreign visitors.
Manchester's size makes the social processes more visible. You can see how things are developing. Where they might end up is another matter. Who knows? But Manchester, as Mancs love to tell you, has been ahead of the game. Perhaps it'll be the first place to show us whether our new cities work.
Manchester Divided. Jim McClellan, Esquire.
By no stretch of the imagination is Manchester a picturesque city. It is however, emphatically if unconventionally beautiful. In common with all things beautiful... it is fundamentally flawed. It has a compulsion to preen and show off. It is narcissistic, contrary and wayward, and yet you cannot help but love it. It is both admirable and maddening.
Change and Contradiction, Diverse City, Chris Lethbridge.
Look again at those buildings... as examples of frozen energy they fill you full of amazement. Some Mancunians must have been giants. What dreams did these people have? And do they still have them?
Up North, Charles Jennings (referring to ex-textile warehouses).
Manchester... the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery.
Historian AJP Taylor.
In those days [pre-WW2] for a Mancunian to visit [London] was an exercise in condescension. London was a day behind in Manchester in the arts, in commercial cunning, in economic philosophy... Manchester was generous and London was not.
Little Wilson, Big God Anthony Burgess' autobiography.
I would like to live in Manchester. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.
A disapproving Mark Twain in the nineteenth century.
The Age of Ruins is past. Have you seen Manchester? Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.
Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli, 1844.
When entering... Manchester, a stranger, overwhelmed by the new and interesting spectacle presented to him, scarcely dares look this giant full in the face.
Ireland, Scotland and England, J.G. Kohl, 1844.
[H]ere the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.
Count Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840.
|
