Neo Victorian Quotes

“No, not really. But …” Okay, I couldn’t help but gloat a little. “She likes me.”
Samedi didn’t even look at me. “Well of course, you’ve had that bloody uniform on all day. I was half ready to tell you how much I liked you.”
― Lia Habel, Dearly, Departed

“I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“She wore a loose-fitting purple velvet Pre-Raphaelite gown, and her abundant dark-brown hair flowed down her back and shoulders to her waist. As she drew near, I noticed her warm brown eyes peeping at me beneath lush, un-plucked brows, her smiling red lips and smooth, un-powdered cheeks almost begging for kisses. She possessed a beauty much different from Daisy, more like a wildflower in the unspoiled earth than a prize-winning rose in a formal garden. However, her Pre-Raphaelite fashion might have been an affectation of a different kind, a bit closer to nature but a stylish imitation just the same.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter

“One of Lucy's admirers took to her, apparently."

"Took to her?" echoes William, his own feelings for Sugar causing him to construe the phrase benignly.

"Yes," said Bodley "With her own riding crop."

"Beat her very severely."

"Particularly about the face and mouth."

"I understand all the fight's gone out of her now."

"Well, as you can imagine," he says. "Madam Georgina doesn't have high hopes. Even if she's willing to wait, there will be scars."

Ashwell, eyes downcast, is picking at the lint on his trousers. "Poor girl," he laments.

"Yes," smirks Bodley. "How are the fighty maulen.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Grief is a violent emotion, a sort of acid that eats away at the best parts of us.”
― Laura Purcell, The Corset

“Notoriety is by no means a death sentence in the world of art.”
― Laura Purcell, The Corset

“You'll call me heartless for thinking such thoughts. Maybe I was: a cavity yawned in my ribs, where once I'd felt a heart beat back.”
― Laura Purcell, The Corset

“I might set at the window in that tower there my chest covered in diamonds, and gaze over the hills, remembering my lost love.
A romantic picture, but utterly stupid. I should be bored after an hour.”
― Laura Purcell, The Corset

“Existence as a society wife must be akin to standing in a bog. That slow, sinking sensation. I would be dragged down day by day, grow vacuous and preoccupied with frivolity like those around me. I should begin to resemble Papa or - God forbid - Mrs Pearce. At least with David I may strive to be a better person, practical and helpful to my fallen creatures.”
― Laura Purcell, The Corset

“I rather fancy, if you will forgive me an aphorism, that we live in not the Age of Reason, as so many proclaim, but in that of Ignorance; for there is nothing reason so readily proclaims to the attentive mind as the extent of our ignorance. It transforms what were once mysteries, for ever inaccessible to human comprehension, into merely phenomena we have not yet explained, and thereby at once increases what we know and what we do not.”
― Brian Ruckley, The Edinburgh Dead