Victorian Quotes - Page 4

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

  Eoin Colfer

  Doctors, Chairs, Artemis Fowl

  Eoin Colfer (2002). “Artemis fowl: the Arctic incident”

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• 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

  Dream, Betrayal, Book

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.171, Penguin

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• You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Art, Hands, Elephants

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• We think of mortality so little these days... I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones. Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I: As I am so will you be.

  Tana French

  Determination, Tombstone, Thinking

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

  Stella Gibbons

  Apples, Kind, Eating

  Stella Gibbons (1977). “Cold comfort farm”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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

  Emilie Autumn

  Girl, Ifs

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

  Naomi Wolf

  Self Esteem, Ovaries, Her Beauty

  Naomi Wolf (1990). “The Beauty Myth”, Vintage

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• What if all those strange and unexplainable bends in history were the result of supernatural interference? At which point I asked myself, what's the weirdest most eccentric historical phenomenon of them all? Answer:the Great British Empire. Clearly, one tiny little island could only conquer half the known world with supernatural aid. Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functions on werewolf pack dynamics.

  Gail Carriger

  Fashion, Army, Islands

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• 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.

  Errors, Superstitions, Lace

  National Review, January 16, 1962.

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

  Mason Cooley

  Stars, Sky, Sorrow

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• One of my most sentimental items is my grandmother's engagement ring that my mom gave me a few years ago. It's a Victorian-style setting that's closed in the back, so it doesn't sparkle the way diamonds do now. I wear it as a pendant.

  Georgina Chapman

  Mom, Grandmother, Years

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• 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

  Nature, Attitude, Lying

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• 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

  Falling In Love, Educational, Reading

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

  James Agate

  Women, Sheep, Expression

  James Agate (1946). “A Shorter Ego: Ego 4, Ego 5, Ego 6”

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• 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

  Army, Grandfather, India

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• 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

  Dream, Responsibility, Rights

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• Napoleon, who had an aversion to the moral laxity of the eighteenth century, which he blamed on the domination of society by women, was determined to reform family life on Roman, or perhaps rather on Corsican, principles. It was with him, not with Queen Victoria, that Victorian morality originated.

  J. Christopher Herold

  Queens, Principles, Reform

  J. Christopher Herold (1983). “The Horizon book of the age of Napoleon”, Harmony

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

  Russell Brand

  Funny, Names, Oddities

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• 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 aren't in the best traditions of the AWU or, indeed, trade unionism.

  Bill Shorten

  Unions, Tradition, Trade

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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

  Book, Gay, Men

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• In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.

  Tom Peters

  Morning, Business, Writing

  "The Peters Principles". Interview with Virginia Postrel, reason.com. October 1997.

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• I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.

  Terry Pratchett

  Work Out, Doe, Watches

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• 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

  Kindness, Hard Work, Men

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

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Glasses, Giving, Whiskers

  "Uncle Dynamite". Book by P. G. Wodehouse, 1948.

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• 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

  Summer, Writing, Self Love

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

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