Doctor Thorne Quotes

“Conduct! Is conduct everything? One may conduct oneself excellently, and yet break one's heart.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Wounds sometimes must be opened in order that they may be healed.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Rest and quiet are the comforts of those who have been content to remain in obscurity.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“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, Doctor Thorne

“He had a pride in being a poor man of a high family; he had a pride in repudiating the very family of which he was proud; and he had a special pride in keeping his pride silently to himself.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Buying and selling is good and necessary; it is very necessary, and may, possibly, be very good; but it cannot be the noblest work of man; and let us hope that it may not in our time be esteemed the noblest work of an Englishman.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, 'Women grow on the sunny side of the wall.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“And what had Mary said when these fervent protestations of an undying love had been thrown at her feet? Mary, it must be remembered, was very nearly of the same age as Frank; but, as I and others have so often said before, "Women grow on the sunny side of the wall." Though Frank was only a boy, it behoved Mary to be something more than a girl. Frank might be allowed, without laying himself open to much just reproach, to throw all of what he believed to be his heart into a protestation of what he believed to be love; but Mary was in duty bound to be more thoughtful, more reticent, more aware of the facts of their position, more careful of her own feelings, and more careful also of his.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“I would carry you home, Mary, if it would do you a service,” said Frank, with considerable pathos in his voice. “Oh, dear me! pray do not, Mr Gresham. I should not like it at all,” said she: “a wheelbarrow would be preferable to that.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Well, then, I’ll hope in this case. But, uncle—” “Well, my dear?” “I want your opinion, truly and really. If you were a girl—” “I am perfectly unable to give any opinion founded on so strange an hypothesis.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“[your heart] That is your own estate, your own, your very own, --your own and another's. Whatever may go to the moneylenders, don't send that there. Don't mortgage that.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“England a commercial country! Yes; as Venice was. She may excel other nations in commerce, but yet it is not that in which she most prides herself, in which she most excels. Merchants as such are not the first men among us; though it perhaps be open, barely open, to a merchant to become one of them. Buying and selling is good and necessary; it is very necessary, and may, possibly, be very good; but it cannot be the noblest work of man; and let us hope that it may not in our time be esteemed the noblest work of an Englishman.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“such was the beauty of the landscape, that a lover of scenery would be tempted thus to lose himself.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“The castle itself was a huge brick pile, built in the days of William III., which, though they were grand days for the construction of the constitution, were not very grand for architecture of a more material description.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Sell yourself for money! why, if I were a man I would not sell one jot of liberty for mountains of gold. What! tie myself in the heyday of my youth to a person I could never love, for a price! perjure myself, destroy myself—and not only myself, but her also, in order that I might live idly! Oh, heavens! Mr Gresham! can it be that the words of such a woman as your aunt have sunk so deeply in your heart; have blackened you so foully as to make you think of such vile folly as this? Have you forgotten your soul, your spirit, your man's energy, the treasure of your heart? And you, so young! For shame, Mr Gresham! for shame—for shame.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“I quite feel that an apology is due for beginning a novel with two long dull chapters full of description.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Frank and Mary had been so much together in his holidays, had so constantly consorted together as boys and girls, that, as regarded her, he had not that innate fear of a woman which represses a young man's tongue; and she was so used to his good-humour, his fun, and high jovial spirits, and was, withal, so fond of them and him, that it was very difficult for her to mark with accurate feeling, and stop with reserved brow, the shade of change from a boy's liking to a man's love.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Another misfortune was, that he was a bachelor. Ladies think, and I, for one, think that ladies are quite right in so thinking, that doctors should be married men. All the world feels that a man when married acquires some of the attributes of an old woman—he becomes, to a certain extent, a motherly sort of being; he acquires a conversance with women's ways and women's wants, and loses the wilder and offensive sparks of his virility. It must be easier to talk to such a one about Matilda's stomach, and the growing pains in Fanny's legs, than to a young bachelor.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Great was the anger of Lady Arabella, loud were the protestations of the girl, mute the woe of her father, piteous the tears of her mother, inexorable the judgment of the Greshamsbury world. But”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“but things had arranged themselves, as they often do, rather than been arranged by him.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Oh! do look at Miss Oriel's bonnet the next time you see her. I cannot understand why it should be so, but I am sure of this—no English fingers could put together such a bonnet as that; and I am nearly sure that no French fingers could do it in England.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“If any father have a son whose besetting sin is a passion for alcohol, let him take his child to the room of a drunkard when possessed by "the horrors." Nothing will cure him if not that.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“Faint heart never won fair lady.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“when a man's heart is sad—sad—sad to the core, a few words from a parson at the last moment will never make it all right.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“How the aspirations, and instincts, and feelings of a household become changed as the young birds begin to flutter with feathered wings, and have half-formed thoughts of leaving the parental nest!”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“on behalf of his special hobbies, he was ready to meet the world at large.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“How frequent it is that men on their road to ruin feel elation such as this! A man signs away a moiety of his substance; nay, that were nothing; but a moiety of the substance of his children; he puts his pen to the paper that ruins him and them; but in doing so he frees himself from a score of immediate little pestering, stinging troubles: and, therefore, feels as though fortune has been almost kind to him.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne

“And”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne [with Biographical Introduction]

“if you wish to represent your county in Parliament, as has been done by your father, your grandfather, and your great-grandfathers; if you wish to keep a house over your head, and to leave Greshamsbury to your son after you, you must marry money.”
― Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne