Yorkshire Quotes

He did not feel as if he were inside a Pillar of Darkness in the middle of Yorkshire; he felt more as if the rest of the world had fallen away and he and Strange were left alone upon a solitary island or promontory. The idea distressed him a great deal less than one might have supposed. He had never much cared for the world and he bore its loss philosophically. ~ Susanna Clarke

I couldn't really take a girl from Berlin to live in Leeds. I love it here. I miss the Yorkshire sense of humor and things like bitter and Yorkshire puddings, but I can still get my hands on salt 'n' vinegar crisps. ~ Sam Riley

I was painfully shy, so my aunt suggested to my mum that me and my brother go to Stage 84, a performing arts school in Yorkshire. I've probably romanticised it in my head, but I seem to remember that in the space of an hour's drama workshop, I was transformed. I went in really shy, and I came out full of confidence. ~ Christian Cooke

While Mr Loveday aired my lady's sheets, I set to scratching up a supper. With not even time to change from my own damp clothes I had in one-half hour some welcoming tea steaming and hot brandy to mix a punch. Our bill of fare was the remnants of Mrs Garland's Yorkshire Pie, still sound and savory, fried bacon, and a hillock of roasted rabbits that disappeared as quickly as I made them. The last of the seed cake was eaten too, with a douse of brandy sprinkled over it to warm us.
'She will not eat those beggarly scraps,' said Jesmire, the spiteful old cat, when I took a tray of food to my lady's door. Yet I did see a slice of brandied cake disappear. I knew my mistress well enough by then, and she was a slave to her sugar tooth. ~ Martine Bailey

The river is of no use to a yorkshire cat, it is the moors he is looking for. ~ Diane Setterfield

She took a deep breath, looking up at the ceiling for a long moment. A raindrop moved slowly down her neck; he watched as it turned down the slope of
her breast to disappear inside the collar of her shirt.
He was seriously contemplating becoming jealous of a droplet of water. Yorkshire was obviously damaging to his sanity. ~ Sarah MacLean

She woke to the sound of the sea, the sound of home. A cool breeze floated through the open window, carrying a dandelion seed inside with it. Jinny-Joes as she called them, although Nana Martha insisted they were called fairies in Yorkshire, and if you caught one you had to make a wish. Olivia watched it dance in a shaft of sunlight before it settled onto the pillow beside her. She picked it up and twirled it around between her thumb and finger. Something about its fragility spoke to her of letting go, of being blown on the wind to some unknown place. She closed her eyes and made a wish. ~ Hazel Gaynor

And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish. ~ Ben Elton

One of the grandest figures that ever frequented Eastern Yorkshire was William Smith, the distinguished Father of English Geology. My boyish reminiscence of the old engineer, as he sketched a triangle on the flags of our yard, and taught me how to measure it, is very vivid. The drab knee-breeches and grey worsted stockings, the deep waistcoat, with its pockets well furnished with snuff-of which ample quantities continually disappeared within the finely chiselled nostril-and the dark coat with its rounded outline and somewhat quakerish cut, are all clearly present to my memory. ~ William Crawford Williamson

We have had for breakfast, toasts, cakes, a yorkshire pie, a piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, ham and eggs ... ~ Charles Dickens

Michael Faraday, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, was born in south London in 1791. He was self-educated, leaving school at fourteen to become an apprentice bookbinder. He engineered his own lucky break into the world of professional science after attending a lecture in London by the Cornish scientist Sir Humphry Davy in 1811. Faraday sent the notes he had taken at the lecture to Davy, who was so impressed by Faraday's diligent transcription that he appointed him his scientific assistant. Faraday went on to become a giant of nineteenth-century science, widely acknowledged to have been one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time. Davy is quoted as saying that Faraday was his greatest scientific discovery. ~ Brian Cox

I can't start the day without a cup of tea from my favourite mug, can you? I like Yorkshire Tea the best. What about you? ~ Juno Dawson

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there. ~ David Bowie

One story sums up their magical quality. On June 30th 1968, at the height of Apple optimism, Paul McCartney and Derek Taylor were driving back to London from Saltaire, Yorkshire, where they had been recording the Black Dyke Mills Band on a song of Paul's called 'Thingummybob'. They were in Bedfordshire. Let's pick a village on the map and pay it a visit, said Beatle Paul. He found a village called Harrold, which they found quite hilarious, and turned off the A5. Harrold turned out to be a picture-perfect village, with a picture-perfect pub at its heart. The pub was closed, but when the villagers saw there was a Beatle at the door they opened it up. Soon the whole village was in the pub, listening to Paul McCartney on the pub piano playing the as-yet-unreleased 'Hey Jude'. Every Harrold resident danced and sang along, and the revelry went on until 3 a.m. It was beautiful, perfect, spontaneous and full of love. Harrold. You couldn't make it up. ~ Bob Stanley

The boy with the haunted eyes was Dory's secret. Eli. And she knew that she had to see him again. ~ Teresa Flavin

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?" I quirked an eyebrow back at him.

"Well, usually it's best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes againlater." He paused, smirking. "Also, if
I was going to paddle barefoot "I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I'd wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You're clearly a Spartan lass. ~ J.A. Ironside

Brummies run themselves down, they're very self-deprecating. Whereas Yorkshire people certainly aren't. ~ Jonathan Meades

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). ~ Richard Dawkins

I also have two dogs, a Chihuahua and a Yorkshire terrier, so if they like him, that's a good sign. ~ Christina Milian

It wouldn't bother me in the least if all the dogs in the world weere placed in a large sack and taken to some distant island - Greenland springs attractively to mind - where they could romp around and sniff each other's anuses to their hearts' content and would never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this roundup is poodles. Poodles I would shoot.
To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of the, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect. ~ Bill Bryson

I don't do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you! ~ Patrick Stewart

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship. ~ David Mitchell

I was convinced I'd hate Twitter - but I've come to like it very much. I use it mostly to keep in touch with friends and colleagues I wish I could see more often - I sometimes feel a little isolated living in Yorkshire, and it's nice to have the contact. ~ Joanne Harris

There is much boasting among the young men about their teams as their horse and carts in Cleveland. Most of the Yorkshire men take as much delight in their ox draught as they used to do in their Horse Draught. ~ Nathaniel Smith

I have told you some of his faults, reader: as to his good points, he was one of the most honourable and capable men in Yorkshire; even those who disliked him were forced to respect him. He was much beloved by the poor, because he was thoroughly kind and very fatherly to them. To his workmen he was considerate and cordial. When he dismissed them from an occupation, he would try to set them on to something else, or, if that was impossible, help them to remove with their families to a district where work might possibly be had. ~ Charlotte Bronte

As it began, rain ended quickly in Yorkshire. There was no gradual waning of water, no silent mist to ease the way from heavy drops to dry skies. Instead, there was a simple change, like the snuffing of a candle. One moment, there was pounding rain, and the next ... silence. ~ Sarah MacLean

And there was that letter from the Bramleys - that really made me feel good. You don't find people like the Bramleys now; radio, television and the motorcar have carried the outside world into the most isolated places so that the simple people you used to meet on the lonely farms are rapidly becoming like people anywhere else. There are still a few left, of course - old folk who cling to the ways of their fathers and when I come across any of them I like to make some excuse to sit down and talk with them and listen to the old Yorkshire words and expressions which have almost disappeared. ~ James Herriot

I like Yorkshire Tea - very strong and English. ~ Elsa Peretti

Yorkshire word and means spoiled and ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

the memorial stained-glass window dedicated to the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, on whose side God had been in two world wars, though this hadn't prevented them suffering heavy casualties. ~ David Nobbs

I look back with the greatest pleasure to the kindness and hospitality I met with in Yorkshire, where I spent some of the happiest years of my life. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

You need to be careful around those posh boys when you go to Oxford. They may seem charming, but they're not like nice dependable Yorkshire lads. ~ Georgiana Derwent

As a young girl, I was too intent on getting to London and drama school and out of east Yorkshire to think about winning Oscars. I did win a Bafta once, and was so unprepared for it I jabbered on for a minute - a minute too long. ~ Anna Maxwell Martin

Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey
and returned. ~ Jasper Fforde

Yorkshire is so much part of me. ~ Susan Hill

They were already out of her lands, and in another day Yorkshire would be behind them altogether. By the end of the week she'd be in London, resuming her life as if this trip had never happened. Three or four months from now, Harry, acting as her land steward, might write to ask if she wanted him to present his report on her lands in person. And she, having just returned from another soiree, might turn the letter over in her hand and muse, Harry Pye. Why, I once lay in his arms. I looked up into his illuminated face as he joined his flesh with mine, and I was alive. She might toss the letter on her desk and think, But that was so long ago now and in a different place. Perhaps it was only a dream.
She might think that.
George closed her eyes. Somehow she knew that there would never come a day when Harry Pye was not her first memory when she woke and her last thought as she drifted into sleep. She would remember him all the days of her life.
Remember and regret. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

And soon I'll return to the white rose of Yorkshire, where the sky bathes my soul with a watering can. ~ Carrie Firestone

He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

What is that song they are singing Is it an old Yorkshire ditty you know like that 'On Ilkley Moor Bar T'at' "
Ruby said "Nah it's a football song. It goes 'We hate Chelsea we hate Chelsea we are the Chelsea haters. ~ Louise Rennison

Granny was truly marvellous; five feet of Yorkshire common sense, love, and superstition. She was always saying wise things. I remember, among many sayings, when one time she had given me a particularly good present, she said, "No it's not generous. Being generous is giving something that's hard to give." She was so superstitious that she kept a set of worthless china to break when she happened to break something good, on the grounds that breakages always came in threes and it was as well to get it over. I would have been lost without Granny, that I know. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

I come from Yorkshire in England where we like to eat chip sandwiches - white bread, butter, tomato ketchup and big fat french fries cooked in beef dripping. ~ Helen Fielding

When crossed with Yorkshire, Hampshire, or Chester White females, the Duroc breed can create some top-rung F1 females for producing butcher stock and show pigs. ~ Kelly Klober

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
Naturally, about a murder. ~ George Orwell

East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual. ~ David Hockney

Elle Remembered Yorkshire road and the flat he shared with Caitlin and their daughter, and she almost stopped and turned back, and then she hardened herself against it.
It's his problem if he wants to sleep with someone and he shouldn't, she told herself. It's a one night thing. I'm in the clear. It's sex, nothing else. ~ Harriet Evans

Sal and Henry return with a gust of warm garden air and I settle down to create miniature roses from sugarpaste using tiny ivory spatulas and crimpers. I will have no antique tester bed crowning my cake, only a posy of flowers: symbols of beauty and growth, each year new-blossoming. I let Henry paint the broken pieces with spinach juice, while I tint my flowers with cochineal and yellow gum. As a pretty device I paint a ladybird on a rose, and think it finer than Sèvres porcelain.
At ten o'clock tomorrow, I will marry John Francis at St. Mark's Church, across the square. As Sal and I rehearse our plans for the day, pleasurable anticipation bubbles inside me like fizzing wine. We will return from church for this bride cake in the parlor, then take a simple wedding breakfast of hot buttered rolls, ham, cold chicken, and fruit, on the silver in the dining room. Nan has sent me a Yorkshire Game Pie, so crusted with wedding figures of wheatsheafs and blossoms it truly looks too good to eat. We have invited few guests, for I want no great show, and instead will have bread and beef sent to feed the poor. And at two o'clock, we will leave with Henry for a much anticipated holiday by the sea, at Sandhills, on the southern coast. John Francis has promised Henry he might try sea-bathing, while I have bought stocks of cerulean blue and burnt umber to attempt to catch the sea and sky in watercolor. ~ Martine Bailey

Uncle Eric holding court, proud the only time he ever left Yorkshire was to kill Germans. ~ David Peace

So what do you do, then?" she demanded after about a block. "I'm the curator of e-manuscripts for the British Library, just outside of Yorkshire." When she stopped abruptly again, he braced himself for what he knew what to come. No one believed him when he talked about his work, and certainly no one believed that he, of all people, was a librarian. Too young, too thin, too...male. ~ Alexis D. Craig

Emily's world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can't think why or where she would run to. ~ Jude Morgan

My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives. ~ Brian Blessed

They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic – nor ever done any one the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire. ~ Susanna Clarke

It was the Reverend Ben Swift Chambers who was the acknowledged founding father of St Domingo's football team and therefore Everton FC. Chambers' unkempt, lost grave was discovered in the Yorkshire village of Shepley, and then restored thanks to the investigative work of author Peter Lupson and the full support of Everton FC. ~ Everton Football Club

The authorities in Yorkshire have rounded up their rioters, and divided them into those to be charged with affray and manslaughter, and those to be indicted for murder and rape. Rape? Since when do food riots involve rape? But I forget, this is Yorkshire.530 ~ Hilary Mantel

I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears. ~ James Herriot

roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs. The ~ J.K. Rowling

MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills. ~ Joan Didion

I'm such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I've got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish. ~ Sebastian Coe

Ey oop, nah then, si thi, asta summat simla i' verdigris? ~ Aaron Chynn

I grew up in Yorkshire, and once or twice a year, we'd travel over the Pennines to see my cousins in Cheshire. ~ Anthony Browne

Harry's mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and, for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs. The Dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he'd never been allowed to eat as much as he liked. Dudley had always taken anything that Harry really wanted, even if it made him sick. Harry piled his plate with a bit of everything except the peppermints and began to eat. It was all delicious. "That does look good," said the ghost in the ruff sadly, watching Harry cut up his steak. ~ J.K. Rowling

I have had an amazingly fortunate life. I'm a child from Yorkshire, which is sort of like Cleveland without the pretty bits. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

I recently saw a restaurant in the U.S. that boasted of serving authentic African cuisine. Africa is a big place. The distance from Tangier, in Morocco, to Cape Town, in South Africa, is over five times more than the distance from London to Rome. Yet, we don't compare tortellini with Yorkshire pudding. This so-called 'authentic African cuisine' featured dishes from what looked like two or three north African countries. When I looked through the kitchen window, out of curiosity, I saw Asian staff and what appeared to be a Mexican chef. Multiculturalism is a good thing, but ~ Danielle Hugh

The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to. ~ Joe Strummer

My dad, Donald, was a vet and had a practice in Yorkshire. Cats and dogs were his bread and butter, but his greatest love was large animals. ~ Alastair Campbell

It chances that I'd a letter myself by today's post, from Uncle Jonas Henry.' He chuckled. 'Seemingly he's as throng as he can be, and a trifle hackled with me for loitering here. I shall have to post off to Huddersfield next week, sir - and a bear-garden jaw I'll get when I arrive there, if I know Jonas Henry! ~ Georgette Heyer

I like Yorkshire terriers. They're good to wash your car with. They fit right in the bucket. ~ Billiam Coronel