Please feel free to add quotes into the comments relating to the UK’s cathedrals. And to get you thinking who said the following:
- “I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.” – The author of this quote is a writer related to a famous lighthouse building family.
- “The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air as if there were no such thing as change on earth.” – The author of this quote about Canterbury Cathedral owned a house in Rochester and another in Broadstairs.
- “Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.”- The author of this quote won a Nobel prize having served in Richard Nixon’s administration.
- “The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.” – The author of this quote is also known as the Sage of Chelsea.
- Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.” – The author of this quote wrote a poem that featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
- “The most expensive part of building is the mistakes.” – The author of this quote writes thrillers and historical novels. He wrote two books which featured the town of Kingsbridge.
- “The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, to hit the bottom yard of the pillars on the north side of the nave. Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how the individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral. Where the south transept lighted the crossways from a hundred and fifty foot of grisaille, the honey thickened in a pillar that lifted straight as Abel’s from the men working with crows at the pavement.” – The author of this rather lengthy quote about the building of Salisbury Cathedral is most famous for his debut novel written in 1954 that saw a party of children stranded on an island with unpleasant consequences.
- “If you seek his monument, look around.” – whose epitaph is this and where can it be found?
- “Along the sculptures of the western wall I watched the moonlight creeping: It moved as if it hardly moved at all Inch by inch thinly peeping Round on the pious figures of freestone, brought And poised there when the Universe was wrought To serve its centre, Earth, in mankind’s thought.” The author of this verse wrote about Salisbury Cathedral after visiting it he is best known for his novels set in Wessex.
- “Somehow, cathedrals have contrived to snap free of the sectarian exclusivity of the parish church. They answer to a longing for congregation and communal space. Their key is a quality unfashionable to social analysis, the offer of solitude with beauty. You need not to be of faith to sit quietly and contemplate the loveliness of a cathedral. As a dean once hinted to me in a whisper, “Here we don’t bang on about God.” The author of this quote writes for The Guardian and wrote book called England’s Cathedrals.
