Victorian Quotes - Page 3

• The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind.

  Camille Paglia

  Dirty, Hands, Mind

  "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality". Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, 1994.

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• Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.

  Patti Smith

  Art, Children, Guitar

  "Just Kids". Book by Patti Smith, www.cbc.ca. January 4, 2011.

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• There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn’t strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.

  David Rakoff

  Men, Years, Mind

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• Hey,” the cabbie yelled. “How’s about a tip?” “You bet-ski,” Evie said, heading toward the old Victorian mansion, her long silk scarf trailing behind her. “Don’t kiss strange men in Penn Station.

  Libba Bray

  Kissing, Men, Long

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• A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

  Connie Willis

  Dog, Cat, Space

  Connie Willis (2009). “To Say Nothing of the Dog”, p.479, Bantam

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• 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.

  Sadie Frost

  Beautiful, Daughter, Mother

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The Victorian era is the sexiest age for me, but I also like a woman in a pair of jeans.

  Dylan McDermott

  Jeans, Age, Eras

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• Thrift is not some obsolete Victorian notion. . . . It will be the difference between those who prosper and achieve respect and those who become a burden to their children and society.

  Peter George Peterson

  Life, Children, Differences

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• The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no track list at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.

  Lavinia Greenlaw

  Order, Track, Choices

  Lavinia Greenlaw (2015). “The Importance of Music to Girls”, p.140, Faber & Faber

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• I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.

  Connie Willis

  Sleep, Idyllic, Wonderland

  Connie Willis (2009). “To Say Nothing of the Dog”, p.206, Bantam

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• The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

  Naomi Wolf

  Beautiful, Believe, Men

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• There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Hallucinations, Wilderness, Melancholy

  Audrey Niffenegger (2009). “Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

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• Verbosity was an established Victorian trait.

  Matthew Engel

  Traits

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• 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.

  Terry Pratchett

  Sibling, Funeral, Generations

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• In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Dark, Men, Space

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• We're creating a TV show of Scrooge, starring Jamie Farr, with Buddy Hackett as Scrooge. We're shooting in this Victorian set for weeks, and Hackett is pissed all the time, angry that he's not the center of attention, and finally we get to the scene where we've gotta shoot him at the window, saying, "Go get my boots," or whatever. The set is stocked with Victorian extras and little children in Oliver kind of outfits, and the director says, "All right, Bud - just give it whatever you want." And Hackett goes off on a rant. Unbelievably obscene.

  Bill Murray

  Children, Tv Shows, Creating

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• Tides of History provides a splendid prism through which we may view the wider world of Victorian science. . . . Historians of science will have cause to heap praise on this book, but so too will the non-specialists. The author's splendid writing style, at times appropriately Puckish, makes this work an accessible and enjoyable read.

  William M. Fowler

  Book, Writing, Views

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• I think worldwide, the movement has been towards accepting and respecting the individuality and the rights of gay people, lesbians and transgender people. Here, however, age-old cultural mindsets - which also comes from Victorian times, affect the thinking of people.

  Kabir Bedi

  Gay, Thinking, Rights

  Source: www.youthkiawaaz.com

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• The easier sex gets, the less intimate every sexual act gets. In the Victorian period, a kiss was like a f - k. And now, you know, when actual sexual acts become so easy, their intimacy declines and their meaning declines.

  Stephen Marche

  Sex, Kissing, Intimacy

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.

  Jane Jacobs

  House, Fancy, Building

  Source: www.metropolismag.com

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• Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

  Jane Jacobs

  War, Ideas, People

  Interview with James Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001.

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• The only acceptable way to solve ecological problems is if you can persuade people to have fewer children. In the Victorian times, there were families of 15 children. Someone like Edward Lear, he was the last of 21 children. And so what we have to think about is offering people the alternative choice. And in the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. I'm wanting human beings to be better off so they don't view children as an insurance for the future.

  David Attenborough

  Children, Thinking, Offering

  Source: www.lagoonsociety.com

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• Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

  Mason Cooley

  Stars, Sky, Sorrow

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• The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Errors, Superstitions, Lace

  National Review, January 16, 1962.

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• The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Glasses, Giving, Whiskers

  "Uncle Dynamite". Book by P. G. Wodehouse, 1948.

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