Top 88 Victorian Quotes

Oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels – not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I was very fortunate I was able to live at least a few years of my life in the tort of opulent Victorian era. It helps romanticize your view of life.

I’m fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I’m fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.

I was the eldest daughter with these four beautiful younger sisters with ringlets and pretty faces, and I used to dress them up in Victorian clothes and take them out for the day and pretend they were mine.

The Victorian Age was very stimulating, historically impressive.

Blushes are fun. I like to do circles – like a Caravaggio painting almost, or Victorian looking.

When I was younger, we’d stay at stately homes, and at the end of dinner, women would have to leave the table. I used to sit there. I wouldn’t leave. I felt England should come out of the Victorian era.

The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.

As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.

I’ve just written a very gritty, non-magical take on the King Arthur legend, ‘Here Lies Arthur,’ and I’m currently toying with some other historical ideas, as well as working with the illustrator David Wyatt on some sequels to my Victorian space opera ‘Larklight.’

Still often interventionist, convinced of our importance in the world, even those of us born long after 1900 live in a country that is much more Victorian than we think.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I’m always trying to access when I write.

We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

Some ministers are fond of talking about a return to Victorian values. We must realise that those Victorian values are being expressed by some of the younger people in this society in shameful and disturbing disregard for other members of their generation who are not as fortunate as they are in having a job.

My father was a Victorian product. He didn’t marry until he was over 40. I knew him more as a grandfather than a father. You didn’t lie or cheat with him. I would never have defied my father.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

The Indian education system, like the Indian bureaucratic system, is Victorian and still in the 19th century. Our schools are still designed to produce clerks for an empire that does not exist anymore.

Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn’t come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they’re totally cutting loose.

Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.

I collect things called ‘samplers’ which are Victorian pieces of needlework usually done by children in a workhouse to show that they have a skill which can be used in service, stitching household linen or that kind of thing. I think they’re very humble and very beautiful.

Us comics guys tend to get really good at the things we draw a lot. I’m good at creepy old forests, Victorian houses, underground goblin cities, and beautiful but creepy fairies.

Actual Victorian mores and politics were a reaction to a specific series of historical events, technological and scientific developments, and ethical trends in which the commodification of people was de rigueur.

The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.

Politics is a rough and tumble business, and yet there seems to be an effort by the commentariat to sanitise American politics to some type of high-level Victorian debating society.

If you look at Victorian England, being a soldier was considered a noble profession.

To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that’s because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement.

My humor was Victorian – and still is.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.

Many of the Victorian and Edwardian activists who campaigned for Irish home rule, for instance, also wanted what they called ‘home rule all round’: separate parliaments not simply for Ireland but also for the Scots and the Welsh – and for the English.

Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.

I had a very happy childhood. But I was sent off to boarding school at quite a young age, this massive Victorian house that was suffocated in ivy. I think there is a part of that school in ‘Heap House.’

I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘novelist’ because that sounds like a Victorian person.

When I was a child, one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother – a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I’d close him up in it and joggle him and say, ‘We’re in Victorian times now… and now we’re in Egyptian times, and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.’

My contemporary art collection began with just needing to put things on the wall. I was looking around my Victorian house thinking, ‘What would be the coolest is contemporary art – it will make me look young and interesting.’ I’m more than 80 percent skeptical of the whole thing.

I love white linens and walls mixed with antique Victorian furniture.

We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

The recession of the late 1980s was a very visible humiliation. Cities across Britain had become the victims of botched battlefield surgery – surgery that involved the ripping up of factories, the flattening of buildings, and the razing of the Victorian heritage of heavy labour.

In ‘Age of Innocence,’ the opening flowers, that’s a metaphor for the film, the Victorian veneer with the malevolence beneath it. We attempted to show that with flowers that start as sweet and then slowly become malevolent.

I like Victorian children’s novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that’s what I’ll hunt for now and again at old book stores.

The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.

It is a sort of great Victorian truth that actually, trying to do the right thing is pretty good for you and pretty good for business as well, by and large.

So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.

I will buy Victorian tea dresses and the like, but I don’t really think about them as investment pieces – just beautiful and vintage things.

Halloween isn’t the only time for ghosts and ghost stories. In Victorian Britain, spooky winter’s tales were part of the Christmas season, often told after dinner, over port or coffee.

There have been 14 versions that I can find of Burke & Hare movies. They have all been horror films and all the movies have taken place in Victorian times, which doesn’t make any sense.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

My dad hates reggae. He’s from St. Kitts, which is a really British island, with Victorian values. He doesn’t have a strong Caribbean accent. He didn’t play Caribbean music in the house. He was really into soul music, collecting soul 45s.

I’m in the early stages of a film called ‘Freezing Time’ about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man.

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.

My voice went recently, never happened before, off like a tap. I had to sit in silence for nine days, chalkboard around my neck. Like an old-school mime. Like a kid in the naughty corner. Like a Victorian mute.

When I went to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne to study drama, I felt I’d finally found my place in life.

I was Lady Gaga way before her time. I had a wee kettle for a handbag. Didn’t everyone, at some point? One of the teachers used to call me Dame Flora Robson because I had this big, long Victorian skirt. And I wore a Peruvian hat. It was the 1980s – people were wearing lots of lace.

American culture is very good at interpersonal relationships and people skills, whereas we’re incredibly adept at academics and straightforward 19th-century Victorian education.

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.

I’ve admired historical clothes like Victorian gowns since I was a child, and it’s what motivated me to go into fashion.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed ‘steampunks.’ Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

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.

I’ve always been drawn to the Edwardian period in England. To me, it seems like such a fascinating time, when the British Empire was at the height of its powers and the strict mores of the Victorian age were dissipating into the decadence of King Edward’s reign.

The late Victorian Era brought in part-time education. Not everybody went to school, but they were supposed to have a decent level of schooling; they went part-time after 12.

I love the idea of exploring the Victorian imagination and what Victorians thought the world of fantasy would look like.

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.

Purpose has always been part of Unilever’s DNA. Our founder, William Lever, built a business around the sale of Lifebuoy soap that was not only profitable and sustainable but also helped transform the health of the poor in Victorian Britain.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.

Vampires are so old that they don’t need to impress anyone anymore. They’re comfortable in their own skin. It’s this enigmatic strength that’s very romantic and old-fashioned. I think it goes back to something of a Victorian attitude of finding a strong man who’s going to look after his woman.

If I didn’t already sense that I was different, I certainly was reminded, whether by my parents or by the other school kids. Not just reminded. Told… I was made to believe it wasn’t right. If I went a little bit too off – slap! It was Dad’s upbringing and it was Victorian, and that’s the way he was.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

Yes, if you lace your corset up as snugly as is humanly possible, it will undoubtedly impede your breathing and make you more likely to faint. But it’s not certain that Victorian women really did that on a regular basis.

The Greens simply don’t understand that a strong economy is the key to a better Victoria for all Victorian families.

Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn’t write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began – the first morning – and I’ve never stopped.

‘The Victorian Internet’ is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended.

I don’t watch television, but I saw ‘The Office’ by accident. I thought it was so sophisticated, the Victorian love story, and so bold. We’d do anything, all of us, to not work in that environment, and then I’m sitting there watching hours of it.

I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

Britain’s passion for Christmas and huge white weddings dates from Victorian times – both were low-key celebrations before Victoria and her PR machine.

I hope I succeed in demonstrating that you may equally find compelling and significant narratives – stories that alter or add to our understanding of history – in unprepossessing places: a Victorian sewer system; a Cold War bunker; derelict hospitals.

One of the things I really like about Victorian novels is the close anatomisation of character. People’s gestures and mannerisms and the quality of their thought is very closely identified and analysed.

Science fiction has never been about the future; it’s always been about the present day whether it’s Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I’m writing about.

As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.

Economists have understood since the Victorian era that the main benefits of trade come from comparative advantage: the idea that people can specialize in what they’re good at and then benefit from exchange. The principle is no more mysterious than specialization in the labor market.

Among my favorite half-dozen topics is the field of Victorian female explorers, the intrepid women who packed up their parasols and petticoats and roamed the world in search of adventure. Some were scientists, some artists, some unabashed curiosity-seekers who simply went out to see what they could see.

The idea of close encounters of the zero’th kind – which is to say, not a close encounter at all, but simply uncovering evidence that someone’s out there – dates back to the Victorian era.

When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term ‘Puritanism’ as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism.

Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

We’ve lived in our Victorian house for 20 years and the kitchen is the centre of family life – we don’t just eat here, we live here.