Victorian quotes:

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  • Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor. -- Charles Palliser
  • I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era. -- Annie Lennox
  • I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter. -- Freddie Mercury
  • I love big, bold, truthful theater - the tradition of Victorian theater. -- Harold Prince
  • I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours. -- Sarah Waters
  • We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby. -- W. Somerset Maugham
  • I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it. -- Fred Tomaselli
  • My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic. -- Georgina Chapman
  • My interests span biology, though sometimes I feel like an anachronism, somebody from the Victorian era when there weren't so many boundaries dividing the sciences. -- Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
  • I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person. -- Dawn French
  • The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era. -- Laurie R. King
  • Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels. -- Wilbur Smith
  • My voice went recently, never happened before, off like a tap. I had to sit in silence for nine days, chalkboard around my neck. Like an old-school mime. Like a kid in the naughty corner. Like a Victorian mute. -- Adele
  • I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this. -- Margaret Atwood
  • Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old. -- Terry Pratchett
  • I'm in the early stages of a film called 'Freezing Time' about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man. -- Andy Serkis
  • I don't watch television, but I saw 'The Office' by accident. I thought it was so sophisticated, the Victorian love story, and so bold. We'd do anything, all of us, to not work in that environment, and then I'm sitting there watching hours of it. -- Val Kilmer
  • The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop. -- Terry Pratchett
  • The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age. -- Robert Gottlieb
  • My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. -- John Irving
  • Journalists are always calling my features Edwardian or Victorian, whatever that means. I am small, and people were smaller in those times. I'm pale and sickly-looking. I look fragile-like a doll. But sometimes I just wish I had less of a particular look, one that was more versatile. -- Helena Bonham Carter
  • Verbosity was an established Victorian trait. -- Matthew Engel
  • All of Victorian verse is pentameter. -- Derek Walcott
  • Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard. -- Margaret Atwood
  • Certainly, Doctor. Let's talk about your chair. Victorian? -- Eoin Colfer
  • I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise. -- John Green
  • The Victorian world is extremely dark and extremely bright. -- Harry Treadaway
  • My favourite men's clothes are like Victorian British clothing. -- Sean Lennon
  • Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England. -- Stephen Gardiner
  • Redheads get so stereotyped. You're either exotic and wild or totally Victorian. -- Alicia Witt
  • Simply put, if you are a Wayward Victorian Girl, I'll find you. -- Emilie Autumn
  • Redheads get so stereotyped. Youre either exotic and wild or totally Victorian. -- Alicia Witt
  • The greatest architectural illusion is not Baroque fancy or Victorian flamboyant, but minimalism. -- Kevin McCloud
  • Modern Christians should not mistake our post-Victorian sense of propriety for moral purity. -- Gene Edward Veith Jr.
  • Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us. -- Mason Cooley
  • The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty. -- Naomi Wolf
  • If you look at Victorian England, being a soldier was considered a noble profession. -- Jeff Lindsay
  • I wouldnt mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours. -- Sarah Waters
  • We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us. -- A. N. Wilson
  • The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. -- Lytton Strachey
  • Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret. -- Ralph Nader
  • I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder. -- Susan Hill
  • She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple. -- Stella Gibbons
  • The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass. -- P. G. Wodehouse
  • It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism. -- Gunnar Myrdal
  • With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century -- Winston Churchill
  • The Greens simply don't understand that a strong economy is the key to a better Victoria for all Victorian families. -- Denis Napthine
  • The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over. -- Connie Willis
  • The Victorian era is the sexiest age for me, but I also like a woman in a pair of jeans. -- Dylan McDermott
  • The Greens will threaten the future of our strong economy. They will destroy jobs and put Victorian families at risk. -- Denis Napthine
  • In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness - like a sheep painted by Raphael. -- James Agate
  • I think I would like to be in Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer. That kind of thing. Without disease. -- Rod Serling
  • I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am. -- Margaret Thatcher
  • Martha Stewart has two houses in East Hampton. She has an old fashioned Victorian house and a very new modern house. -- Steven Gaines
  • I was brought up very conservatively. My father was positively Victorian - I wasn't even allowed to wear my hair down. -- Britt Ekland
  • I've admired historical clothes like Victorian gowns since I was a child, and it's what motivated me to go into fashion. -- Olivier Theyskens
  • Even in name, he seems like a Victorian oddity. "Igor, fetch 'the Crouch' from the catacombs, we're going to the graveyard". -- Russell Brand
  • The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are! -- H. L. Mencken
  • In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it. -- Ashley Montagu
  • There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy. -- Audrey Niffenegger
  • Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs. -- Nicolas Roeg
  • One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded. -- Danny Boyle
  • When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous. -- Margaret Atwood
  • I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies. -- Alastair Reynolds
  • In Victorian England, people were told they should discourage their wives from reading because it would lead them into all sorts of devilish wickedness. -- Marion Bailey
  • The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold. -- Philippa Gregory
  • I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion. -- Sara Sheridan
  • We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary. -- Ken Follett
  • The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair. -- D. A. Carson
  • Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines. -- Richard Flanagan
  • Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity. -- Nick Harkaway
  • Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted. -- Sara Sheridan
  • After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour -- Ellen Glasgow
  • I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores. -- Joss Whedon
  • I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century. -- Eleanor Catton
  • I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff. -- Colin Meloy
  • I'm obsessed with the Victorian era and the British Royal Navy... I'd love to play a troubled sailor or captain or a boatman on a three masted ship. -- Nick Offerman
  • I joined an Internet community of Victorian scholars, which meant that if I posted a question about 1875's lavender harvest, more than a thousand experts would ponder it. -- Michel Faber
  • A Rogue by Any Other Name' is the first book in the 'Rules of Scoundrels' series, centered on a legendary pre-Victorian casino and her four scandalous aristocratic owners. -- Sarah MacLean
  • I went to a grim Victorian school with classes of 40 or 50 children. It was a very rigid and unimaginative education, but it did teach us the three Rs. -- Tom Paulin
  • To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that's because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement. -- Gail Carriger
  • When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term 'Puritanism' as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism. -- Leland Ryken
  • Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ. -- Kenneth Rexroth
  • Thrift is not some obsolete Victorian notion. . . . It will be the difference between those who prosper and achieve respect and those who become a burden to their children and society. -- Peter George Peterson
  • Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. -- Bill Bryson
  • The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase. -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
  • Us comics guys tend to get really good at the things we draw a lot. I'm good at creepy old forests, Victorian houses, underground goblin cities, and beautiful but creepy fairies. -- Ted Naifeh
  • It is a sort of great Victorian truth that actually, trying to do the right thing is pretty good for you and pretty good for business as well, by and large. -- Chris Patten
  • I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books. -- Simon Callow
  • Actual Victorian mores and politics were a reaction to a specific series of historical events, technological and scientific developments, and ethical trends in which the commodification of people was de rigueur. -- N. K. Jemisin
  • Oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures. -- Sandra Tsing Loh
  • I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best-known books, the Mortal Engines series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future. -- Philip Reeve
  • Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels. -- Wilbur Smith
  • One of the things I really like about Victorian novels is the close anatomisation of character. People's gestures and mannerisms and the quality of their thought is very closely identified and analysed. -- Eleanor Catton
  • One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way. -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  • In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate. -- Robert Hass
  • The Indian education system, like the Indian bureaucratic system, is Victorian and still in the 19th century. Our schools are still designed to produce clerks for an empire that does not exist anymore. -- Sugata Mitra
  • Within the sphere of steampunk, there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless 'neo-Victorian' novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness. -- N. K. Jemisin
  • There have been 14 versions that I can find of Burke & Hare movies. They have all been horror films and all the movies have taken place in Victorian times, which doesn't make any sense. -- John Landis
  • Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class. -- Martin Cruz Smith
  • I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era. -- Connie Willis
  • Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class. -- Martin Cruz Smith
  • If you walked around like David Bowie in 1973 in Reading, you'd get beaten up. The 1970s in a small town was more like the 1950s.. and that's the truth. The backdrop was probably Victorian. -- Ricky Gervais
  • But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge. -- John Fowles
  • The idea of close encounters of the zero'th kind - which is to say, not a close encounter at all, but simply uncovering evidence that someone's out there - dates back to the Victorian era. -- Seth Shostak
  • The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens. -- Colm Toibin
  • What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective. -- Bertrand Russell
  • You have to put yourself to one side and get away from the 'Victorian poet' model where you are the universe. You have to do everything you can to take your ego out of the equation. -- Peter Wolf
  • The Victorian Internet' is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended. -- John Battelle
  • The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated. -- Eleanor Catton
  • Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires. -- C. E. M. Joad
  • (E)ach generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup -- if any. -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • I was the eldest daughter with these four beautiful younger sisters with ringlets and pretty faces, and I used to dress them up in Victorian clothes and take them out for the day and pretend they were mine. -- Sadie Frost
  • I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write. -- Joan Didion
  • At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens. -- Michel Faber
  • The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution. -- Salman Rushdie
  • To the best of my knowledge, when I became national secretary and, indeed, Victorian secretary, the - my predecessors in the union had detected wrong activities, activities which arent in the best traditions of the AWU or, indeed, trade unionism. -- Bill Shorten
  • Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation. -- Paul Di Filippo
  • Steampunk, the repurposing of Victorian culture and technology for contemporary fun and profit, is so ubiquitous - in media, books, fashion, music, cosplay, and maker culture - that we tend to imagine its superficial aspects are all that define it. -- Paul Di Filippo
  • I think worldwide, the movement has been towards accepting and respecting the individuality and the rights of gay people, lesbians and transgender people. Here, however, age-old cultural mindsets - which also comes from Victorian times, affect the thinking of people. -- Kabir Bedi
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