If Walls Could Talk Quotes

“Many argue that the twentieth century’s council estates have had disastrous social consequences. People in poverty feel, and indeed actually grow, poorer if forced to live in a sink estate, while the middle classes flee to their own leafy ghettoes outside city centres. A successful ‘place’ mixes up the different groups in society, forcing them to mingle and to look out for each other.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home

“This change in biological understanding had enormous implications for society. Women gradually shed their medieval stereotype as insatiable temptresses in order to become the Victorian ideal of pure, chaste, virginal angels. A society where sexual order was maintained by physical chastisement gradually began to give way to internal moral codes, where behaviour was policed by social forces such as shame and expulsion from the community for sexual transgression.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home

“Washing up was always one of the very worst jobs in the kitchen. Albert Thomas, who’d done it many times himself, recalled that even a modest dinner party for ten in a wealthy household of the 1920s required no less than 324 items of silver, china and glass to be washed, in addition to the saucepans.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“But there too fine cooking would become inescapably French. Its greatest proselytiser was Julia Childs, who had an infectious passion for sauce. Her book of 1961, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her TV show, The French Chef, encouraged the ‘servantless American cook’ to abandon all concern for ‘budgets, waistlines, time schedules’ and ‘children’s meals’ in order to throw him- or herself into ‘producing something wonderful to eat’. Elizabeth Bennet would have been horrified.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“Clifford’s servant, however, had looked in ‘through the key-hole, and seeing his master hanging, brake in before he was quite dead, and taking him down, vomiting a good deal of blood’. He was just in time to hear Lord Clifford’s last words, which were ‘there is a God, a just God above’.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“We live today in an age of deadened senses.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay
One hour longer: so that we might either
Sit up, or go to bed together? Lady Catherine Dyer’s epitaph for
her husband William, 1641”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“a barricade of possessions intended to stabilise a precarious position in the world.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“Sir, there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“Disgust’ is a modern concept: only when food is relatively abundant can people afford to overlook certain forms of nutrition on the grounds of nastiness. In lean, mean times no one found any type of food disgusting.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought goods … is a certain margin of crudeness. The margin must never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“The emphasis on ‘reason and sense’ is very typical of an Enlightenment physician.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home

“As Dr Johnson put it: Sir, there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”
― Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home