Famous Yorkshire Quotes

The head inclines; the cardinal says, in those honeyed tones, famous from here to Vienna, ‘So now, tell me how was Yorkshire.’ ‘Filthy.’ He sits down. ‘Weather. People. Manners. Morals.

this had originally been the HQ of the famous Halifax Building Society, before mutuality had largely been abandoned in the greedy years since Thatcher. Carter smiled at his boss’s political reference but it meant little to him; he couldn’t remember the time before Thatcher.

In his famous novel Émile (1762), Rousseau tries to show that boys should be brought up as close to nature as possible, learning by experience. Girls do not need to be educated rationally: their role in life is to please men. Accordingly, Thomas abstracted two girls from orphanages and named them Sabrina and Lucretia. He took them to France to educate them according to Rousseau’s precepts so that one girl could become the perfect wife (one was a spare). He taught them to read and write, and tried to instil in them a hatred of fripperies like fashion, fine titles and luxuries. While the girls were growing up, Day became enamoured of several genteel women, none of whom were prepared to conform to his ideas of wifely perfection. Meanwhile, Lucretia did not cope well with Day’s training programme and he was forced to abandon the experiment. He gave her some money and she later married a shopkeeper. However, Thomas became more and more attached to Sabrina, and their friends expected them to marry. According to Richard Lovell Edgeworth in his Memoirs, Day was ‘never more loved by any woman… nor do I believe, that any woman was to him ever personally more agreeable.’ But Sabrina ‘was too young and artless, to feel the extent of that importance, which my friend [Day] annexed to trifling concessions or resistance to fashion, particularly with respect to female dress.’ Day left Sabrina at a friend’s house, along with some strict instructions on her mode of dress. Then disaster struck over a ‘trifling circumstance… She did, or did not, wear certain long sleeves, and some handkerchief, which had been the object of his dislike, or of his liking.’ Unfortunately Day equated her obedience to his wishes with proof of her attachment; disobedience proved ‘her want of strength of mind.’ So Thomas ‘quitted her for ever!’ He later married a Yorkshire heiress; Sabrina married a barrister.

My lands showed like a full moon about me, but now the moon's i'the last quarter, waning, waning; and I am to think that moon was mine. Mine and my father's and my forefathers': generations, generations! Down goes the house of us, down, down it sinks. Now is the name a beggar, begs in me; that name, which hundreds of years has made this shire famous, in me and my posterity runs out.

Morecambe and Wise, the famous team of Northern comedians, used to complain about the propensity of Yorkshire audiences to “zip their teeth up,” as they put it. Eric Morecambe claimed one man in Leeds said to him, “Ee, lad, thou wert so funny tonight I almost had to laff.