Victorian Quotes

Victorian Quote of the day

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.

The Victorian era is the sexiest age for me, but I also like a woman in a pair of jeans.

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.

It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism.

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise.

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.

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.

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

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.

Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.

We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.

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.

I was brought up very conservatively. My father was positively Victorian - I wasn't even allowed to wear my hair down.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

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.

I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination

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.

I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.

There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

Redheads get so stereotyped. You're either exotic and wild or totally Victorian.

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.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.

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.

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.

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

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

I love big, bold, truthful theater - the tradition of Victorian theater.

The Victorian world is extremely dark and extremely bright.

The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.

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.

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.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

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.

The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.

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.

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.

I've admired historical clothes like Victorian gowns since I was a child, and it's what motivated me to go into fashion.

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.