Trollope Quotes

A man has usually to work through much mud before he gets his nugget. ~ Anthony Trollope

At the Quebec prison, he had read Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, then had autographed the book and given it to a guard for a souvenir. ~ Erik Larson

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge? ~ Anthony Trollope

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,
cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness. ~ Anthony Trollope

Wine is valued for its price, not its flavor. ~ Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER XV A FIT COMPANION, - FOR ME AND MY SISTERS ~ Anthony Trollope

The bucolic mind of East Barsetshire took warm delight in the eloquence of the eminent personage who represented them, but was wont to extract more actual enjoyment from the music of his periods than from the strength of his arguments. ~ Anthony Trollope

I have listened to much dull and heavy conversation in America, but rarely to any that I could strictly call silly (if I except the every where privileged class of very young ladies). ~ Frances Trollope

It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually. ~ Anthony Trollope

Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places. ~ Anthony Trollope

Wars about trifles are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers? ~ Anthony Trollope

I never saw any people who appeared to live so much without amusement as the Cincinnatians ... Were it not for the churches, ... Ithink there might be a general bonfire of best bonnets, for I never could discover any other use for them. ~ Frances Trollope

Is it to be imagined ... that women were made for no other purpose than to fabricate sweetmeats and gingerbread, construct shirts, darn stockings, and become mothers of possible presidents? Assuredly not. Should the women of America ever discover what their power might be, and compare it with what it is, much improvement might be hoped for. ~ Frances Trollope

It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing ~ Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER XXIX THE SENATOR'S LETTER ~ Anthony Trollope

It may, indeed, be assumed that a man who loses his temper while he is speaking is endeavouring to speak the truth such as he believes it to be, and again it may be assumed that a man who speaks constantly without losing his temper is not always entitled to the same implicit faith. ~ Anthony Trollope

She went up to her room, disembarrassed herself of her finery, ~ Anthony Trollope

It's dogged as does it. ~ Anthony Trollope

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out. ~ Jane Smiley

There was very much in the whole affair of which he would not be proud as he led his bride to the altar;
but a man does not expect to get four thousand pounds a year for nothing. ~ Anthony Trollope

Money is neither god nor devil, that it should make one noble and another vile. It is an accident, and if honestly possessed, may pass from you to me, or from me to you, without a stain. ~ Anthony Trollope

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. ~ Anthony Trollope

E ate so much that he became too fat to see to eat his vittels. ~ Anthony Trollope

The circumstances seemed to be simple; but they who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature. ~ Anthony Trollope

There is an aptness, a propriety, a fitness in these things which one can understand perhaps better than explain. ~ Anthony Trollope

You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men an women upon the earth ~ Anthony Trollope

There are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been. ~ Anthony Trollope

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee? ... Was ever anything so civil? ~ Anthony Trollope

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything. ~ Anthony Trollope

He was one of those men who, as in youth they are never very young, so in age are they never very old. ~ Anthony Trollope

In life I've rung all changes through,
Run every pleasure down,
'Midst each excess of folly too,
And lived with half the town. ~ Anthony Trollope

The end of a novel, like the end of children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plum ~ Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER L 'IN THESE DAYS ONE CAN'T MAKE A MAN MARRY ~ Anthony Trollope

But mad people never die. That's a well-known fact. They've nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever. ~ Anthony Trollope

Little bits of things make me do it; - perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; - the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver. ~ Anthony Trollope

Though she hardly knew how to explain the matter even to herself, she was sure that there was at present a general heaving-up of society on this matter, and a change in progress which would soon make it a matter of indifference whether anybody was Jew or Christian. For ~ Anthony Trollope

An editor is bound to avoid the meshes of the law, which are always infinitely more costly to companies, or things, or institutions, than they are to individuals. ~ Anthony Trollope

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. ~ Anthony Trollope

Never mingle love and business. ~ Anthony Trollope

Your average genre novel is like a high speed car chase ending in a massive crash, with death, destruction, and balls of flame, from which the main characters (usually) emerge mostly unscathed. Everything builds up to the crash, and it's the anticipation that keeps us turning pages.

Anthony Trollope, by contrast, is like a pleasant Sunday afternoon drive through the countryside in an open carriage behind a pair of matched horses. There's conflict, sure; a herd of sheep blocks the road, two countrymen come to blows outside the pub, the cows in this field are looking daggers at the cows in that field. But the point of the drive is the drive itself, not the destination, because of course you're just going to end up at home anyway. ~ Will Duquette

I don't need to marry again. I've been married twice, and I love it when it works, but these days we live until we're 80 and marriages are jolly long. ~ Joanna Trollope

He liked to be kindly treated, to be praised and petted, to be well fed and caressed; and they who so treated him were his chosen friends. He had in this the instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog. ~ Anthony Trollope

When he entered the drawing-room she was sitting alone, in a large, low chair, made without arms, so as to admit the full expansion of her dress, but hollowed and rounded at the back, so as to afford her the support that was necessary to her. She had barely spoke three words since she had left the dining-room, but the time had not passed heavily with her. ~ Anthony Trollope

As will so often be the case when a men has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer, in using which, either for defence or attack, a man can hardly measure the strength of the blows he gives. ~ Anthony Trollope

A man who is supposed to have caused a disturbance between two married people, in a certain rank of life, does generally receive a certain meed of admiration. ~ Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER LXX AT LAST ~ Anthony Trollope

I don't think you truly realize what it means for the gates of Tyersall Park to be closed to you forever."

Nick laughed. "Jacqueline, you sound like some character out of a Trollope novel! ~ Kevin Kwan

Lord Chiltern recognizes the great happiness of having a grievance. It would be a pity that so great a blessing should be thrown away upon him. ~ Anthony Trollope

In these fits of sad regret from which the latter years of few reflecting men can be free, religion would suffice to comfort him. Yes, religion could console him for the loss of any worldly good. ~ Anthony Trollope

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel. ~ Anthony Trollope

I never believe anything that a lawyer says when he has a wig on his head and a fee in his hand. I prepare myself beforehand to regard it all as mere words, supplied at so much the thousand. I know he'll say whatever he thinks most likely to forward his own views. ~ Anthony Trollope

I always love writing about children. ~ Joanna Trollope

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there. ~ Anthony Trollope

Each had treated the girl as an encumbrance he was to undertake, - at a very great price. But ~ Anthony Trollope

No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be, --truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational. ~ Anthony Trollope

I don't like anybody or anything, said Lucinda.
Yes, you do;
you like horses to ride, and dresses to wear. ~ Anthony Trollope

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement. ~ Anthony Trollope

When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum. ~ Anthony Trollope

When a man gets into his head an idea that the public voice calls for him, it is astonishing how great becomes his trust in the wisdom of the public. ~ Anthony Trollope

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States. ~ Anthony Trollope

No one ever on seeing Mr Crawley took him to be a happy man, or a weak man, or an ignorant man, or a wise man. ~ Anthony Trollope

He has gone, Mamma,' she said, as she entered the breakfast-room. 'And now we'll go back to our work-a-day ways. It has been all Sunday for me the last six weeks. ~ Anthony Trollope

There would be a blaze and a confusion, in which timid men would doubt whether the constitution would be burned to tinder or only illuminated; but that blaze and that confusion would be dear to Mr. Daubney if he could stand as the centre figure, the great pyrotechnist who did it all, red from head to foot with the glare of the squibs with which his own hands were filling all the spaces. ~ Anthony Trollope

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort ... reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung ... ~ Anna Quindlen

It is rarely [Americans] dine in society, except in taverns and boarding-houses. Then they eat with the greatest possible rapidity, and in total silence ... ~ Frances Trollope

A man's own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to anyone else. ~ Anthony Trollope

It is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, and nothing but the wish to obtain some particular article of finery will ever induce them to submit to it. ~ Frances Trollope

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder. ~ Anthony Trollope

the public is defrauded when it is purposely misled. Poor public! how often is it misled! against what a world of fraud has it to contend! ~ Anthony Trollope

Had the heavens fallen and mixed themselves with the earth, had the people of London risen in rebellion with French ideas of equality,* had the Queen persistently declined to comply with the constitutional advice of her ministers, had a majority in the House of Commons lost its influence in the country, - the utter prostration of the bereft husband could not have been more complete. ~ Anthony Trollope

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person. ~ Joanna Trollope

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the 'classical' English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, 'Oh, but that's OLD!' and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to' read, ~ George Orwell

CHAPTER XL LORD RUFFORD WANTS TO SEE A HORSE ~ Anthony Trollope

Why is it that when men and women congregate, though the men may beat the women in numbers by ten to one, and through they certainly speak the louder, the concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women's voices? ~ Anthony Trollope

Perhaps no terms have been so injurious to the profession of the novelist as those two words, hero and heroine. In spite of the latitude which is allowed to the writer in putting his own interpretation upon these words, something heroic is still expected; whereas, if he attempt to paint from Nature, how little that is heroic
should he describe! ~ Anthony Trollope

She was an old woman who thought all evil of those she did not know, and all good of those whom she did know.... ~ Anthony Trollope

Love is involuntary. It does not often run in a yoke with prudence. ~ Anthony Trollope

There are men whose energies hardly ever carry them beyond looking for the thing they want. ~ Anthony Trollope

It is hard to conceive that the old, whose thoughts have been all thought out, should ever love to live alone. Solitude is surely for the young, who have time before them for the execution of schemes, and who can, therefore, take delight in thinking ~ Anthony Trollope

Whatever may be the talents of the persons who meet together in [American] society, the very shape, form, and arrangement of the meeting is sufficient to paralyze conversation. The women invariably herd together at one part of the room, and the men at the other ... The gentlemen spit, talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again. The ladies look at each other's dresses till they know every pin by heart ... ~ Frances Trollope

There was once a people in some land - and they may be still there for what I know - who thought it sacrilegious to stay the course of a raging fire. If a house were being burned, burn it must, even though there were facilities for saving it. For who would dare to interfere with the course of the god? Our idea of sorrow is much the same. We think it wicked, or at any rate heartless, to put it out. If a man's wife be dead, he should go about lugubrious, with long face, for at least two years, or perhaps with full length for eighteen months, decreasing gradually during the other six. If he be a man who can quench his sorrow - put out his fire as it were - in less time than that, let him at any rate not show his power! ~ Anthony Trollope

We all overlay our feelings with too much thinking. We are afraid of our feelings because they are arbitrary and volatile, and we often need literature to make our feelings intelligible to us, to make us see that our reaction to what we can't choose and what we can is what shapes our lives. ~ Joanna Trollope

But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it? Who at least ever declined a love secret? What sister could do so? ~ Anthony Trollope

Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine. ~ Anthony Trollope

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. ~ Anthony Trollope

Lord Chiltern Rides His Horse Bonebreaker ~ Anthony Trollope

If a husband be not master of his wife´s heart, he has no right to her fealty; if a wife ceases to love, she may cease to be true. ~ Anthony Trollope

Everything about her room betokened wealth; but she had put away the French novels, and had placed a Bible on a little table, not quite hidden, behind her own seat. ~ Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER LVII MRS. MORTON RETURNS ~ Anthony Trollope

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more. ~ Anthony Trollope

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant. ~ Louis L'Amour

As man is never strong enough to take unmixed delight in good, so may we presume also that he cannot be quite so weak as to find perfect satisfaction in evil. ~ Anthony Trollope

Let a man be of what side he may in politics, unless he be much more of a partisan than a patriot, he will think it well that there should be some equity of division in the bestowal of crumbs of comfort. ~ Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER LXXII 'BID HIM BE A MAN ~ Anthony Trollope

Such was the beauty of the landscape, that a lover of scenery would be tempted thus to lose himself. ~ Anthony Trollope

A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds. ~ Anthony Trollope

This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written. ~ Anthony Trollope

The bishop did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrated; and that in these days one might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop; but he looked as though he would have done so, but for his apron. ~ Anthony Trollope

Who doubts that? How many very bad things are there that we do! But if we were to attempt to reform all our bad ways at once, we should never do any good thing. I am not strong enough to put the world straight, and I doubt if you are." Such ~ Anthony Trollope

Of all needs a book has,
the chief need is to be readable. ~ Anthony Trollope