Victorian Quotes

“Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.”
― Bernie Mcgill, The Butterfly Cabinet

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“What if all those strange and unexplainable bends in history were the result of supernatural interference? At which point I asked myself, what's the weirdest most eccentric historical phenomenon of them all? Answer:the Great British Empire. Clearly, one tiny little island could only conquer half the known world with supernatural aid. Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functions on werewolf pack dynamics.”
― Gail Carriger

“I’m going to take Charity to France. I can look after her there. You can go on with your life here, and I won’t be here to … to bother anyone.”
He muttered two quiet words.
“What?” she asked in bewilderment, inching forward to hear him.
“I said, try it.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Marrying Winterborne

“I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.”
― Sara Sheridan

“And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.”
― Charles Dickens, The Haunted House

“Enlarged sympathy with children was one of the chief contributions made by the Victorian English to real civilization.”
― G.M. Trevelyan

“I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid.”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Professor

“Tea no more! Down with bustles!”
― Nancy Moser, Masquerade

“Oh, Ed!" Mom exclaimed. "It's a Victorian.”
― Robert Liparulo, House of Dark Shadows

“Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“Theobald had proposed to call him George after old Mr Pontifex, but strange to say, Mr Pontifex over-ruled him in favour of the name Ernest. The word 'earnest' was just beginning to come into fashion, and he thought the possession of such a name might, like his having been baptised in water from the Jordan, have a permanent effect upon the boy’s character, and influence him for good during the more critical periods of his life.”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“But the moral?’
‘That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Една котка дращеше по вратата, а под каменния под на камината се чуваше звук от гризене на плъхове. Какво искаха те в стаята на смъртта и защо бяха тъй неспокойни и тревожни, Скрудж не дръзваше да си помисли.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“...и благодарение на смъртта на този човек, къщата беше по-щастлива!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Fate is a cunning hussy”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters: Volume 1

“We were mad - drunk with rebellion.”
― E. M. Forster, Where angels fear to tread

“Oh Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed father." - Lizzie Borden, August 4, 1892”
― Lizzie Borden

“The man who entered looked even younger than Inspector Slaughter had expected. His paperwork said he was twenty-seven years old, but he looked more like twenty. And his height bordered on the ridiculous. But it wouldn’t do to comment. Slaughter rose and moved from behind the desk to shake hands.”
― Lisa M. Lane, Murder at Old St. Thomas's

“I, as you may have discovered, regard the whole idea of marriage with abhorrence. I hold that, as things now stand in this civilization of ours, a woman's one absolute right is her right to herself. She is her own inalienable possession. Why should she give herself up to a man; becoming his chattel, to do with as he pleases? Why should she lose all right over her own person, her own property, her own liberty of action and regulation of circumstance? Why should she change her very name for his? If the two could stand on a platform of absolute independence and equality, the thing might be bearable—for some. It would still be intolerable to me! But, as the law and social usage now stand, marriage is—to the woman—practically slavery; and, therefore, an unspeakable degradation!”
― Virginia Woolf

“He didn’t think. He didn’t strategize. For once, he acted purely with his heart, doing what he most wanted to do. What he’d dreamed of doing from almost the first moment of their acquaintance.
He bent his head and he kissed her...”
― Mimi Matthews, A Lady of Conscience

“But there is something else—there is God, and the love of beautiful things. I spent all day yesterday playing Bach's Passion music, and the hours passed like a dream until my sisters came in from walking and began to talk about marriage and men. It made me feel sick—it was horrible; and it is such things that make me hate life—and I do hate it; it is the way we are brought back to earth, and forced to realise how vile and degraded we are. Society seems to me no better than a pigsty; but in the beautiful convent—that we shall, alas! never see again—it was not so. There, at least, life was pure—yes, and beautiful. Do you not remember that beautiful white church with all its white pillars and statues, and the dark-robed nuns, and the white-veiled girls, their veils falling from their bent heads? They often seemed to me like angels. I am sure that Heaven must be very much like that—pure, desireless, contemplative.”
― George Moore, A Drama In Muslin

“But in the beauty of perfect proportions no soul exists; the soul asserts itself in certain bodily imperfections of form, which, when understood, become irresistible charms.”
― George Moore, A Drama In Muslin

“Critics have said that Asian values are indistinguishable from Victorian values (strong family, strong state, strong nationalism).”
― Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age

“Religious enthusiasm breeds no charity, being in its essence intolerant.”
― Henry Cockton, Sylvester Sound, the Somnambulist

“Are we to have a parcel of oligarchs squeezing the marrow out of very bones eternally?”
― Henry Cockton, Sylvester Sound, the Somnambulist

“Opposition is the germ of improvement.”
― Henry Cockton, Sylvester Sound, the Somnambulist

“It is easier, doubtless, to go with the tide than to oppose it; but our object should be to divert the stream when we find that its course is pernicious.”
― Henry Cockton, Sylvester Sound, the Somnambulist

“What the hell are you?”
― Bill Lindsay, Curse of a Devil