Victorian Quotes

See, phrenology is this old Victorian science, which claimed you could determine the dominant traits of a man's personality by studying the bumps on his head. The size and position of these bumps indicated different personality traits. See? Now, /retro-phrenology/ says, why not change a man's personality by hitting him on the head with a hammer, till you raise just the right bumps in the right places!"
"One of us needs a lot more drinks," said Alex. "That's starting to make sense. ~ Simon R. Green

Even in name, he seems like a Victorian oddity. "Igor, fetch 'the Crouch' from the catacombs, we're going to the graveyard". ~ Russell Brand

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors. ~ Walter Hamilton

You may not know this, but talking about mathematics eliminates any possibility of being kissed in the first place. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Your new kitchen should look like it was "born there." That doesn't mean it has to be the exact same style as the house. (You can put a modern kitchen into a Victorian, for example.) It just means that it has to complement the spaces around it. ~ Jamie Gold

This place was not like the Victorian Prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state;no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking. ~ Adrian McKinty

What the hell is this stuff?" he muttered, frowning at the oily spot on the linen cloth. "Pearlman slathered it on me this morning."
"It's macassar oil. Gentlemen use it to keep their hair neat. Nicholas used it," she added pointedly.
"Well, tomorrow he's giving it up. I smell like a rotten apple."
"You do not. And I think it looks rather nice."
He sent her an incredulous look. "I look like an otter. And everything I put my head against gets greasy."
"That's why someone invented the antimacassar," she told him, almost smiling.
"The-aha!" He laughed as he made the connection. "Of course. First they invent something stupid, then something ugly to make up for it. We live in a wondrous age, Annie. ~ Patricia Gaffney

You make me burn with life, and yearn to set aside my cold and distant, solitary ways. ~ Stacy Reid

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

The Victorian era was perhaps the last point in Western history when magic and science were allowed to coexist. ~ Jonathan Auxier

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here ~ Kim Addonizio

He has had her today but he has not had her. No man ever shall. ~ Orna Ross

I'll piously gather up the crumbs of your feasts and make a meal of them," said Nora. "I'll let you know how they taste. ~ Henry James

Still often interventionist, convinced of our importance in the world, even those of us born long after 1900 live in a country that is much more Victorian than we think. ~ Kate Williams

You know this is wrong."

It isn't a question. When he turns, White is still wrapped snug in the counterpane, motionless, just his gaze pursuing the doctor about the room. "I am wrong to do this." The doctor says it as if instructing himself. White says nothing. With a sigh, Archer sits on the edge of the bed, smoothing White's curls back from his forehead. "Do you know what we did last night?" To admit it, to speak out loud, seems in itself a terrible affront. It might be his imagination, but the doctor fancies he sees a slight lowering of black lashes, the tiniest quirk of a shy smile. He says, wearily but not without affection, "No, I don't suppose you do. ~ John T. Fuller

Tides of History provides a splendid prism through which we may view the wider world of Victorian science ... Historians of science will have cause to heap praise on this book, but so too will the non-specialists. The author's splendid writing style, at times appropriately Puckish, makes this work an accessible and enjoyable read. ~ William M. Fowler

Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like. ~ Bart Schultz

I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious. ~ Neal Stephenson

Hey," the cabbie yelled. "How's about a tip?"
"You bet-ski," Evie said, heading toward the old Victorian mansion, her long silk scarf trailing behind her. "Don't kiss strange men in Penn Station. ~ Libba Bray

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society. ~ Thomas Hardy

For those who reject it, the Victorian experience is something to feel embarrassed about, to apologise for, to escape from, and never to repeat. But to those who remain enthralled, it is a fabulous story of oustanding success and splendid achievement, by comparison with which Britain's 20th century records seems at best unimpressive, and often distinctly lacklustre. ~ David Cannadine

This is going to be hideously trite," he says. "Prepare yourself."

"Prepared."

"It's Christmas. You love them. They love you. More than anything else, that's what matters. Things will happen the way they happen, and you'll sort out the way you feel about them, and it will be all right. And you'll keep loving them, and they'll keep loving you, and … God bless us, everyone."

I consider this. "Kind of a weak ending."

"I can't help suspecting it would have resonated more if I were a sickly child in Victorian Britain," he agrees wistfully. ~ Hannah Johnson

I don't write 'romance' stories, but character love stories, like the short story fiction published at Romantic4Ever.com and at WeddingNight.com, with romance of the heart and of adventure, in its many, many human varieties, as seen through the eyes and hearts and bodies of realist characters; whether about military special forces regiments, mail order brides in the outback, class-crossed samurai lovers, wealthy Victorian 'minorities,' or luscious vampires of another color. ~ Neale Sourna

I call [fourth-wave feminism] fainting–couch feminism, a la the delicate Victorian ladies who retreated to an elegant chaise when overcome with emotion. As an equality feminist from the 1970s, I am dismayed by this new craze. Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can't cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism - and for women. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers

In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted. ~ Ian Gregor

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. ~ George Orwell

You can't hurt him. He's an endangered species!"
"Vampires are not endangered." Van's tone made it clear that it was his life's work to rectify this regrettable situation.
"No, not that," Zack said dismissively. "He's a Victorian!"
"Brainwashed," Van muttered.
"Crazy," Sarah proclaimed.
"Steampunk," I corrected with a sigh. ~ Helen Keeble

Poor thing, consigned to a life of frivolousness and wretched things for breakfast. Not allowed to go to school or do anything worthwhile, and eel pie besides. ~ Connie Willis

I've always been drawn to the Edwardian period in England. To me, it seems like such a fascinating time, when the British Empire was at the height of its powers and the strict mores of the Victorian age were dissipating into the decadence of King Edward's reign. ~ Kevin Kwan

'Calcutta is a pot of honey' means that in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the society became truly Victorian in feeling and tone, Bengal was a place to make money. The governor-generals returned to England rich men. It was a bountiful, lush, prosperous, easy place to make a fortune - in coal, in jute, and particularly cloth. ~ Susanna Moore

Peter sat as powerless as an overwhelmed female character in a Victorian drama. ~ Edgar Cantero

Dan wasn't bothered by the cold; nestled beneath two down comforters, he was warm as tea and toast. Yet the wind had found its way inside his head just as it found its way under the sashes and doorsills of the old Victorian he now called home. In his dream, he could hear it moaning around the hotel where he had spent one winter as a little boy. In his dream, he was that little boy. ~ Stephen King

They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously?' he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, 'That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously. ~ A.S. Byatt

He had an overwhelming urge to take possession of her lips, silencing any mention of another man's name. ~ Tamara Hughes

Certainly, Doctor. Let's talk about your chair. Victorian? ~ Eoin Colfer

A lot of women but they are all moving. It takes me a while to see that they are all getting something to give to the men, food, a stool, water, matches for their weed, more food, juice from big Igloos. Livication and liberation my ass, if I wanted to live in a Victorian novel I at least want men who know how to get a decent haircut. ~ Marlon James

In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story material, English publishers laid hands on the subtle, sensual adult fairy tales of the Continental tradition and revised them into simpler stories instilled with Victorian values. Although these simplified versions retained much of the violence of the older stories, elements of sexuality and moral complexity were carefully scrubbed away - along with the fiesty heroines who appeared everywhere in the older tales, tamed now into models of Victorian propiety and passivity. In the 20th century, the Walt Disney Studios watered down the tales further still in popular animated films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, continuing the trend of turning active heroines into powerless damsels in distress. Walt Disney considered even the Victorian versions of the tales too dark for 20th century audiences. "It's just that people now don't want fairy stories the way they were written," Disney commented. "They were too rough." ~ Terri Windling

It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself. ~ Bill Bryson

Many bowdlerized versions indicated a Victorian-minded censorship, which feared that Little Red Riding Hood might some day break out, become a Bohemian, and live in the woods with the wolf. ~ Jack D. Zipes

With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century ~ Winston Churchill

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners - your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future. ~ William Gibson

Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. ~ Virginia Woolf

My work is a fusion of personal experiences and influences - moody atmospheres, victorian-inspired couture, and timeless elements all laced with clandestine symbolism. The figures I paint exist in their own esoteric realm and time, and each painting offers a glimpse into their anomalous world. ~ Lori Earley

back in the middle ages
they burned unruly women at the stake
and out of the ashes of their bones and flesh
rose the Enlightenment and Reason fresh
and the white men declared
there's no such thing as witches
they're just crazy psycho-bitches
but we certainly can't let them run free
lock 'em up and throw away the key
yeah they said: lock 'em up and throw away the key

cause there's nothing scarier than a woman mad and/or
aware of her own magic
tragic how much violence is done
in the name of science
to ensure our silence

in Victorian times they located suffering in our uterus
in the blood in the soft internal organs
took our pain our righteous rage
they called it 'hysteria'
and then Dr. Freud ignored women's horror stories
herstories of abuse and rape and
took a justified hatred of the penis and called it
envy (he sold more books that way) ~ Leah Harris

We had another game where he was the doctor making a house call and I was the proper Victorian lady besieged by hysteria (also known as sexual frustration) which could only be relieved by a paroxysm (also known as an orgasm) the doctor brought on with either his hand or my vibrator. (At first Quinn didn't believe me when I told him that this actually happened in history, and that vibrators were, in fact, invented by doctors whose hands were cramping up from flicking sexually frustrated Victorian beans all day long, but I swear to God it's true. Just another one of those fun facts stored up in my brain.) ~ Melanie Harlow

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

He started up, and wrung my hand in quite an ecstasy of gratitude. How I do hate people who can only express their feelings by hurting other people's hand. ~ Wilkie Collins

The roof was a gymnasium for the winds ~ Thomas Hardy

Mrs. Latham patted Hayley's knee with a frail, liver-spotted hand. 'I'm sure you do, dear. And I'm afraid those kinds of losses don't get any easier as we grow older." Mrs. Latham turned, including Colton in her smile as she changed the subject. 'I'm so thrilled to finally be able to restore Victorian Oaks. It's been my dream for some time." "I understand you grew up there," Colt said. "Yes, indeed. I was a Palmer before I married Mr. Latham. It pains me to see the old house going to ruin. ~ Carol Rose

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the wa ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I've walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes.
I've brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking. ~ Chila Woychik

Weird that a house so new could feel haunted, and not in the romantic Victorian-novel way, just really gruesomely, shittily ruined. ~ Gillian Flynn

As I got older, I got more Victorian and morbid. I got into things that circled around death, like skulls or morgue photographs or handwritten diaries. They can be almost haunted with all this history, and you project onto it and then it gets onto you. ~ Dustin Yellin

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

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947. ~ Mike Davis

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

Victorian feminists made the mistake of making membership of the sisterhood conditional on signing up to a particular policy agenda. Marxist feminists made a similar mistake of saying, 'You can't be a real feminist unless you join with miners, the unions, the vegans.' ~ Naomi Wolf

I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter. ~ Freddie Mercury

True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious. ~ Marina Warner

They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals - but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Where are you going?"
"Out. Like you."
He raised an eyebrow, but he didn't press for more information. "One should always make one's own mistakes, instead of the mistakes of others, amira."
"Out like me, then."
"Dressed like that?"
"And what's wrong with it?"
"It looks like you chose the pieces by throwing darts. And you are terrible at darts. Besides, it's much too short." He pointed vaguely toward my ankles and winked. "The whole world can see the top of your foot. You look like a hussy."
I grabbed my skirt and flashed him my knees. He pretended to swoon. "Don't worry. This is late Victorian, not early. More permissive. ~ Heidi Heilig

... but I don't think I'm the only person who is tired of books and movies full of paper-doll characters you don't care about, who have no self-respect and no respect for anybody or any institution ... ..And I don't want to sound preachy or Victorian, but I'm tired of amorality in fiction and in real life. Immorality is a fascinating human dilemma that creates suspense for the readers and tension for the characters, but where is the tension in an amoral situation? When people have no personal code, nothing is threatening and nothing is meaningful. ~ Olive Ann Burns

Simply put, if you are a Wayward Victorian Girl, I'll find you. ~ Emilie Autumn

(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

SEALs, like the name said, were trained to operate in all conditions - SEa, Air, Land. But Stuffy Victorian Hotel Lobby hadn't made the list. ~ Laura Griffin

Though this is my first trip to the United Kingdom, I am a proud Anglophile. I admire the practical temperament of the people. I love the artful details of daily life: a hand-stitched tea cozy in the shape of a Victorian mansion, the Wellie boots, the sheep's wool stockings, and the best tailors in the world. ~ Adriana Trigiani

Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom.

How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them-amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.

A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister titles. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the "restricted" sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.

But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop. ~ T.E.D. Klein

As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless. ~ Wilkie Collins

Well, this is a story about books."
About books?"
About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind."
You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel."
That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. ~ Bill Bryson

Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on! ~ Charles Dickens

If only words hadn't eluded me today, if only I yelled back at him: I do get it! I get that as long as you live no one will ever love you as much as I do - I have a heart so I can give it to you alone! That's exactly the way I feel - but unfortunately, people don't talk like that outside of Victorian novels. ~ Jandy Nelson

Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational. ~ Ben Macintyre

Mansfield's performance is placed within a general anxiety caused by the proliferation of advertisements for melodramas that contained murder and violence as plot elements. This Victorian debate parallels present-day anxieties about the violence in Hollywood movies and the effect on the general population. ~ Martin A. Danahay

The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen.

Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did.

We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it.

There could never have been a Matthew Arnold. Or any of the Victorian poets. Or any of the other authors of our canon: no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Chaucer.

We would have had none of our revered artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, or Rembrandt. And none of our brilliant composers: Mozart, Handel, or Bach.

To be sure, we would have had other Miltons, Michelangelos, and Mozarts in their places, and it is impossible to know whether these would have been better or worse.

But they would have been incalculably different. ~ Bart D. Ehrman

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait. ~ Pamela Paul

the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In ~ Sebastian Faulks

Many parts of Watford, especially around Vicarage Road Football Stadium, consist of scuzy warrens of Victorian terraced houses ~ Karl Wiggins

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house. ~ Stephen Hawking

We who have seen the truth will reshape the world, and Ireland shall be our entrance to this world beyond words. ~ Orna Ross

Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times. ~ Marya Hornbacher

John had been a footman nearly all of his adult life. He knew decorum and appropriate behavior for his situation. But when he glanced from one twin to another, he nearly ruined his reputation and self-respect forever with...a smile. ~ Sarah Brazytis

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

Use the words that live inside your head. And if the words that live inside your head are those of a sentimental Victorian troubadour, then please close your head in a door jamb until you kill all that overwrought prose in an act of brain damage. ~ Chuck Wendig

In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness - like a sheep painted by Raphael. ~ James Agate

I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society".
"If society were really decent, he would have been ~ George Gissing

This was all strictly run-of-the-mill Victorian patter, striking only for the fact that a man who had so exerted himself to see the world afresh had returned with such stock observations. (And, really, very little has changed; one need only lightly edit the foregoing passages - the crude caricatures, the question of human inferiority, and the bit about the baboon - to produce the sort of profile of misbegotten Africa that remains standard to this day in the American and European press, and in the appeals for charity donations put out by humanitarian aid organizations.) ~ Philip Gourevitch

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill. ~ Naomi Wolf

It was the dog Abel, who - as animals have been reported to do - had made his way over all England's hills and rivers, to return to that home where he was first kindly treated. The warm fire, by which he sleeps even now, and the fattening dish will be his rewards to the end of his days. ~ K.W. Jeter

I'm asking you to tell Lady Cassandra about my good qualities as well as the bad ones."
"What good qualities?" West inquired sharply.
Tom had to think for a moment. "How rich I am? ~ Lisa Kleypas

My favourite men's clothes are like Victorian British clothing. ~ Sean Lennon

I love the alien in people, god I love the wildness, the wit, the lightning of the Other mind. A kind of sex-in-the-head, you know it's a rather Victorian affliction. Something to do with communication. I have had moments of communication with people, often totally unsuitable people, which had a truly unholy intensity... A sort of orgasmic meaningfulness and clarity, you know, all the old romantic stuff - two strangers stop and suddenly exchange glimpses of reality before moving on into the mists. ~ James Tiptree Jr.

There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private. ~ Wallace Stegner

The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope. ~ Bertrand Russell

In racy Victorian novels, beware of young widows. ~ David Mitchell

The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are! ~ H.L. Mencken

But what if Oscar - "
"Breathes fire and threatens to cook you over a grill?"
"I was thinking what if he gets mad, but I think your way works as well."
"Then you shall make for a tasty meal. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

But behind every misguided treatment - from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome - is the incredible power of the human desire to live. ~ Lydia Kang

All the carriages filed out in single file but in a fashion that seemed to mean that they were competing against each other. The only sound that could be heard for a while was the pounding of the horses' hooves and the squeal and groan of the wheels against the road. Their hooves kicked up dirt, creating a storm of dust.
Once the miniature storm and the sound of galloping horses subsided, I could only see one last person. He glared up at me and mouthed, "Next time." Christopher dug his boots into Dawn's muscled flank. She reared up and broke into a gallop through the sparse forest, heading for escape. The last trace of them was the particles of floating dust, bright like floating fire. ~ Erica Sehyun Song