Victorians Quotes

“Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“In 1895 Lady Londonberry commented acidly on a bridegroom who had 'married the 10,000 a year as well as the lady.”
― Pamela Horn, Life As A Victorian Lady

“Of course, Lady Arabella could not suckle the young heir herself. Ladies Arabella never can. They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse.”
― Anthony Trollope, Dr. Thorne

“WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“Sono gli stessi gradini dai quali Jane Austen fa cadere Louisa Musgrove in Persuasione." "Come è romantico." "Gli uomini erano romantici... allora.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

“The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild. But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

“We've been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, "We invented sex!" The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Tess Durbeyfield, in quell'epoca della sua vita, era solo un recipiente di emozioni non ancora colorite dall'esperienza”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Desiderio, Odio, Vita, Morte erano terribilmente vicini nell'ombra”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.”
― Sam Miller, A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes

“Let no lady commence and continue a correspondence with a view to marriage, for fear that she may never have another opportunity. It is the mark of judgment and rare good sense to go through life without wedlock, if she cannot marry from love. Somewhere in eternity, the poet tells us, our true mate will be found.
Do not be afraid of being an "old maid". The disgrace attached to that term long since passed away.
Unmarried ladies of mature years are proverbially among the most intelligent, accomplished, and independent to be found in society.”
― Thomas E. Hill, The Essential Handbook of Victorian Etiquette

“Why not the Victorians and their sentimental grief-wreaths woven from a loved one's hair?”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains