Victorian Quotes - Page 4

• I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

  Joan Didion

  Summer, Writing, Self Love

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

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• All the stories of the Bible that I know came to me first from my grandfather's lips... He would see stories in everything. He told stories very easily and very generously, so I loved him for that. He was a simple man, a Victorian; he was born in 1890-something. He saw no reason and had never seen any reason to question his Christian faith. His faith was strong and simple and that's it. And I, like his other grandchildren and the children in his parish, sheltered underneath it.

  Philip Pullman

  Christian, Strong, Children

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November 2012.

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• In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.

  Tom Peters

  Morning, Business, Writing

  "The Peters Principles". Interview with Virginia Postrel, reason.com. October 1997.

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• When I reached Fort Binjemma, for example, where my grandfather was stationed for a while, the whole Victorian fort was decaying. Barbed wire surrounded it, spray paint on the ancient walls claimed it as private property, and the moat where my grandfather and his men had grown crops - in desperation as the siege's hunger bit - was completely overgrown with bushes and trees.

  Chris Cleave

  Wall, Men, Tree

  "'We Don't Know Our Hearts Until Life Puts Us to the Test' - Chris Cleave on 'Everyone Brave Is Forgiven'". Interview with Erin Kodicek, www.amazonbookreview.com. May 31, 2016.

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• I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don't hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Country, Pride, Grandmother

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• I'm completely uninterested in the origins of Stonehenge. I don't care about the real story behind it or whether it should be saved or not. What I'm interested in is this: in the Victorian era, you could go there as an early cultural tourist and you were given a chisel to chip off a bit of the stones and take it with you. That's what you did in Victorian times.

  Aleksandra Mir

  Real, Care, Stones

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, believermag.com. January 1, 2004.

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• [My muse] likes to inhabit tea leaves, sunlight filtered through bamboo, melancholy clouds over the Devon coastline, a weedy railroad crossing in the Southern States, bubblegum pop from the sixties, torch songs from the forties, undersea caves where B-movie octopi grapple with men in loincloths, sacred groves of pink anime dryads, Victorian fairy paintings executed by gentlemen in lunatic asylums and so on.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Song, Anime, Men

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

  Derek Walcott

  Verses

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I was every Londoner's stereotypical idea of a brash, vulgar American. When I got here, it turned out that London was the Wild West, and New York was like London at the height of the Victorian era, in which everyone was far more obsessed with table manners and status-climbing than they are in London. In London, everyone was just crawling over this blizzard of cocaine. Here, if you have more than a glass of wine with your meal, people refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Toby Young

  New York, Wine, Ideas

  Source: wwd.com

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• The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

  Salman Rushdie

  Class, Progress, History Of Life

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

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• If the embodiment of the fundamental idea of our age were to be found in Victorian architecture, in the Church of Cristo Re in Rome or the Church in Brasilia, in Moscow University or the Capitol in Washington, then our age would undoubtedly be called the 'age of kitsch.'

  Hermann Broch

  Rome, Ideas, Age

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• With the end of the Victorian era, we passed into what I feel I must call the terrible 20th century

  Winston Churchill

  Eras, Century, Ends

  Winston Churchill (1953). “Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952. Edited by Randolph S. Churchill”

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• What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

  Michael Chabon

  Art, Powerful, Inspiration

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• Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.

  C. Sommerville

  Children, Childhood, World

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• What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Age, Prudes

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Marriage and Morals”, p.75, Routledge

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• I have a great interest in Victorian musical & cabaret performances and Weimar artists so the references are there, to Cabaret and also All That Jazz and other films where, where there's a kind of (influential German playwright Bertolt) Brecht-ian approach, almost to the character standing outside of himself or, in this case, he's "self-séance-ing."

  Andy Serkis

  Character, Artist, Self

  Source: collider.com

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• I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.

  Susan Hill

  Dark, Giving, Doe

  Source: www.denofgeek.com

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• True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious.

  Marina Warner

  Different, Done, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My favourite men's clothes are like Victorian British clothing.

  Sean Lennon

  Men, Clothes, Favourite

  "GQ&A: Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl on Mark Ronson, cults and the end of techno". Interview with Tom Ward, www.gq-magazine.co.uk. May 23, 2014.

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• The Jacksonian era is generally talked about in terms of individualism, and the development of free market capitalism, and Victorian prudery. It was shocking to find a parallel history to that - a bunch of Americans with very different priorities. I stumbled on to these people, and then became completely fixated on them. The question that drove me was: how did these reasonable people adopt these extremely unreasonable ideas?

  Christine Jennings

  Ideas, People, Priorities

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Social mobility decreased under Labour and under the current government it is reversing. The differences between the poorest and richest are returning to Victorian levels. We don't have open sewers and infant mortality rates at fifty percent but in economic terms we're getting to a level of disparity we haven't seen for a couple of hundred years. And we're getting there very quickly.

  Jonathan Trigell

  Couple, Government, Years

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.

  Colin Meloy

  Stuff, Novel, Contemporary

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• There was an author who titled his books by days of the weeks and another one that used colors. Then there was Edward Gorey who wrote the book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, about the untimely death of 26 Victorian children, each representing a letter of the alphabet. I thought what a great way to link the titles.

  Sue Grafton

  Children, Book, Color

  Interview with Elise Cooper, crimespreemag.com. August 21, 2015.

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• I'd signed up not just for Christianity but the established Church of England. That has a particular history and I think we rather lost it in the 19th Century, we became so much part of empire and colonialism, the language of the Church Of England still reflects that Victorian time. As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church's role in losing people.

  Alan Green

  Thinking, People, Church

  Source: thequietus.com

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• In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

  Robert Hass

  School, Class, California

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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