Things in Jars Quotes

“Stories, particularly the bad ones, are told in their own time.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“women should have the uncontested right to enter the medical profession, being, as a general rule, notably less stupid than men.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“The moon knows; she sees all.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“The raven turns in her element and the world turns too, confirming what she already knew: she is the centre of everything.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Follow the fulsome fumes from the tanners and the reek from the brewery, butterscotch rotten, drifting across Seven Dials. Keep on past the mothballs at the cheap tailor’s and turn left at the singed silk of the maddened hatter. Just beyond you’ll detect the unwashed crotch of the overworked prostitute and the Christian sweat of the charwoman. On every inhale a shifting scale of onions and scalded milk, chrysanthemums and spiced apple, broiled meat and wet straw, and the sudden stench of the Thames as the wind changes direction and blows up the knotted backstreets. Above all, you may notice the rich and sickening chorus of shit.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“And all at once Bridie is filled with the hot rage that comes over any sane woman who rails against her market price, or the damnable fact that there is a market price in the first place.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Here is time held in suspension. Yesterday pickled. Eternity in a jar.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“You must never watch a leaving friend out of sight, else you'll not see them return.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“This is a practical woman, or at least a woman who finds it practical to be able to fit through doorways, climb stairs, and breathe.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“For this is their parting: as sudden and slow, surprising and foreseen as any parting. Between together and apart: an eyeblink and all of eternity.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Change is always drawing near. Innovation waits like an offstage actor, primed and ready in the wings, biting its lip and grinning.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“isn’t it a gentleman’s primary occupation to look rather than be looked at?”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“At best she had viewed poor Lydia as a dress-up doll, at worst an inconvenience, like February or indigestion.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“he takes a pew, then has a spit and a snort for himself, for he is a muculant man of prodigious phlegm and these present London conditions, what with the raining and the flooding, are of no assistance to him.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Bridie has a plan.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“autumn warmth, fuller-bodied and lovelier than summer heat, with the mellow dying of the season in it. Bridie”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Some specters rattle doorknobs and throw cats and fog looking glasses.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate facade the unlikely union of a warship and a wedding cake. A riot of musket loops, carved shells, liquorice-twist chimneys, mock battlements, a first-floor prow, and an exuberance of portholes. On the carved stone pediment above the wide front door Neptune cavorts with sea nymphs. The lower-floor windows are festooned with theatrical swags of stone starfish and scallop shells. For all this, the house looks unlived in.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Sir Edmund is a collector, an insatiable, relentless collector, with an interest in anomalies and mutations, aberrations and malformations of life in or around the realm of water. If it swims or paddles or blows bubbles in any way oddly, then he'll have it killed, stuffed, or put in a jar, and brought to his private library.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“The tattoos that adorn his body--how clearly Bridie sees them now--are, in fact, moving. She is put in mind of Monsieur Desvigne's Mimoscope. A device of cunning construction (a wonder among wonders at the Great Exhibition), pictures looped between spools, illuminated by a spark. Bridie, transfixed, saw animals, insects, and machinery--static images--flickering to life, to bounce and flutter, slither and winch. Bridie watches this man with the same fascination as, in one continuous motion, an inked anchor drops the length of his biceps. High on his abdomen an empty-eyed skull, a grinning memento mori, chatters its jaw. A mermaid sits on his shoulder holding a looking glass, combing her blue-black hair. On finding herself observed the mermaid takes fright and swims off under the man's armpit with a deft beat of her tail. On his left pectoral an ornate heart breaks and re-forms over and over again.
He is a circus to the eye.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“From a distance, the average-sighted could be forgiven for mistaking Mrs Peach to be in the first flush of wide-eyed, pink-cheeked, white-toothed youth. Mrs Peach is, in fact, somehwat beyond flowering age. Her freshness has been retained - the years rewound, even - by sheer artifice.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars

“Coal smuts fly past and the train ploughs forwards, fire-bellied and smoke-spitting, a mystery of steam pressure and pistons, a miracle of gauges. The engine is a painted comet, its tail rattling behind with every class of passenger hanging on. Many undertake this mode of transportation with nervous trepidation, as well they might; it is well known that regular rail travel contributes to the premature ageing of passengers. Unnatural speed and the rapid travelling of distances have a baleful effect on the organs. Hurrying can prove fatal, notably when combined with suet-based meals, improving spirits and fine tobaccos. The worst offender: the new-built, gas-lit, steam-hauled carriages of Hades which will convey a passenger between Paddington and Farringdon under the very ground of the metropolis. According to reports miscellaneous, the passenger (smoke-blinded, nerve-rattled, near-suffocated) will emerge from the experience variously six months to five years older.”
― Jess Kidd, Things in Jars