Historical Charm Quotes

I like the fact that New York looks a bit backwards, toward the Old World, rather than resolutely forwards.

I've always liked lost, old New York.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.

I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

Malacca fascinates me more and more daily. There is, among other things, a mediaevalism about it. The noise of the modern world reaches it only in the faintest echoes; its sleep is almost dreamless. Its sensations seem to come out of books read in childhood.

Krakow is one of my favorite places on earth. It is a medieval city full of young people. A wonderful, striking combination.

Naples is curiously chaotic and, if I'm honest, a bit dilapidated. It certainly has a 'lived-in' look. It's alive, it's vibrant, it's a little bit dirty, it's busy, and I loved it. I felt like this was how Rome would probably have been 2,000 years ago. There's a real bustle, and it's down and dirty.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

Yet for better or worse we love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.

The English inn stands permanently planted at the confluence of the roads of history, memory, and romance.

The word that most perfectly describes the city of Cuzco is evocative. Intangible dust of another era settles on its streets, rising like the disturbed sediment of a muddy lake when you touch its bottom.