Trollope Quotes & Sayings

A husband is very much like a house or a horse. — Anthony Trollope

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan
the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness. — Alan Jacobs

When men think much, they can rarely decide. — Anthony Trollope

Wine is valued for its price, not its flavor. — Anthony Trollope

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper. — Anthony Trollope

They say that faint heart never won fair lady. It is amazing to me how fair ladies are won, so faint are often men's hearts! — Anthony Trollope

But, like some other undiplomatic ambassadors, in her desire to be civil, she ran at once to the extremity of the permitted concessions. — Anthony Trollope

It is seldom that we know anything accurately on any subject that we have not made matter of careful study," said Mr. Monk, "and very often do not do so even then. We are very apt to think that we men and women understand one another; but most probably you know nothing even of the modes of thought of the man who lives next door to you. — Anthony Trollope

But John Morton would marry her tomorrow if he were well, - in spite of all her ill usage! Of course, he would die, and so she would again be overwhelmed; - but yet she would go and see him. As she determined to do so, there was something even in her hard callous heart softer than the love of money, and more human than the dream of an advantageous settlement in life. — Anthony Trollope

Mrs Grantly after her father's death. This matter, therefore, had been taken out of the warden's hands — Anthony Trollope

Disembarrass the other. — Anthony Trollope

Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places. — Anthony Trollope

A man has usually to work through much mud before he gets his nugget. — Anthony Trollope

A man who desires to soften another man's heart, should always abuse himself. In softening a woman's heart, he should abuse her. — Anthony Trollope

He was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so. — Anthony Trollope

I always love writing about children. — Joanna Trollope

That there should be so wide a difference between us Americans and these English, from whom we were divided, so to say, but the other day, is one of the most peculiar physiological phenomena that the history of the world will have afforded. As — Anthony Trollope

There are words which a man cannot resist from a woman, even though he knows them to be false. — Anthony Trollope

Book love ... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. — Anthony Trollope

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. — Anthony Trollope

Is it to be imagined ... that women were made for no other purpose than to fabricate sweetmeats and gingerbread, construct shirts, darn stockings, and become mothers of possible presidents? Assuredly not. Should the women of America ever discover what their power might be, and compare it with what it is, much improvement might be hoped for. — Frances Trollope

Oh, that that old man in Westmoreland would die and be gathered to his fathers, now that he was full of years and ripe for the sickle! But there was no sign of death about the old man. — Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER XL LORD RUFFORD WANTS TO SEE A HORSE — Anthony Trollope

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world. — Joanna Trollope

Such was the beauty of the landscape, that a lover of scenery would be tempted thus to lose himself. — Anthony Trollope

A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds. — Anthony Trollope

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise. — Anthony Trollope

Those who depart must have earned such sorrow before it can be really felt. — Anthony Trollope

As a general rule, it is highly desirable that ladies should keep their temper: a woman when she storms always makes herself ugly, and usually ridiculous also. There is nothing so odious to man as a virago. Though Theseus loved an Amazon, he showed his love but roughly, and from the time of Theseus downward, no man ever wished to have his wife remarkable rather for forward prowess than retiring gentleness. A low voice "is an excellent thing in woman. — Anthony Trollope

One thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you're married, things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you're single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage, I love figuring out what's for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl. — Nora Ephron

Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel? — Anthony Trollope

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art. — Anthony Trollope

Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners. — Anthony Trollope

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee? ... Was ever anything so civil? — Anthony Trollope

Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable. — Anthony Trollope

I hate a stupid man who can't talk to me, and I hate a clever man who talks me down. I don't like a man who is too lazy to make any effort to shine; but I particularly dislike the man who is always striving for effect. I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth and all that kind of thing ... A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can't show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout. — Anthony Trollope

One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it. — Anthony Trollope

I ain't a bit ashamed of anything. — Anthony Trollope

A man can't do what he likes with his coverts. — Anthony Trollope

A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you'd like to get. — Anthony Trollope

It's dogged as does it. — Anthony Trollope

No living orator would convince a grocer that coffee should be sold without chicory; and no amount of eloquence will make an English lawyer think that loyalty to truth should come before loyalty to his client. — Anthony Trollope

The apostle of Christianity and the infidel can meet without a chance of a quarrel; but it is never safe to bring together two men who differ about a saint or a surplice. — Anthony Trollope

Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music about affairs masculine and feminine, then take the leap in the dark. — Anthony Trollope

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself. — Anthony Trollope

In former days the Earl had been a man quite capable of making himself disagreeable, and probably had not yet lost the power of doing so. Of all our capabilities this is the one which clings longest to us. — Anthony Trollope

Mixed dinner parties of ladies and gentlemenare very rare, which is a great defect in the society; not only as depriving themof the most social and hospitable manner of meeting, but as leading to frequent dinner parties of gentlemen without ladies, which certainly does not conduce to refinement. — Frances Trollope

I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor. The chances are perhaps more in favour of ruin than of success. But, whatever may be the chances, I shall go on as long as any means of carrying on the fight are at my disposal. — Anthony Trollope

I find her [Frances Trollope] simply delightful, even in her prejudices and cantankerousness. It is a gift to an author to find a funny, wry, perceptive contemporary observer to whom the subject matter seems almost as different and alien, and requiring as much struggling to understand, as it did to me. — Charles R. Morris

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens. — Anthony Trollope

That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or aset of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen
makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest state of degradation. — Anthony Trollope

Familiarity does breed contempt; - doesn't it? — Anthony Trollope

Lord Chiltern recognizes the great happiness of having a grievance. It would be a pity that so great a blessing should be thrown away upon him. — Anthony Trollope

He was essentially a truth-speaking man, if only he know how to speak the truth. — Anthony Trollope

Nothing reopens the springs of love so fully as absence, and no absence so thoroughly as that which must needs be endless. — Anthony Trollope

Money is neither god nor devil, that it should make one noble and another vile. It is an accident, and if honestly possessed, may pass from you to me, or from me to you, without a stain. — Anthony Trollope

Why is it that when men and women congregate, though the men may beat the women in numbers by ten to one, and through they certainly speak the louder, the concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women's voices? — Anthony Trollope

Did you ever know a poor man made better by law or a lawyer!' said Bunce bitterly. — Anthony Trollope

She became aware that she had thought the less of him because he had thought the more of her. She had worshipped this other man because he had assumed superiority and had told her that he was big enough to be her master. But now,
now that it was all too late,
the veil had fallen from her eyes. She could now see the difference between manliness and 'deportment. — Anthony Trollope

It is easy to love one's enemy when one is making fine speeches; but so difficult to do so in the actual everyday work of life. — Anthony Trollope

I think I owe my life to cork soles. — Anthony Trollope

It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution. — Anthony Trollope

Ride at any fence hard enough, and the chances are you'll get over. The harder you ride the heavier the fall, if you get a fall; but the greater the chance of your getting over. — Anthony Trollope

Upon my word, sir,'said he, 'I've hardly looked at her. It is not a matter of looks now, as it used to be. It has got beyond that. It is not that I am indifferent to seeing a pretty face, or that I have no longer an opinion of my own about a woman's figure. But there grows up, I think, a longing which almost kills that consideration. — Anthony Trollope

Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night ... Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees. — Anthony Trollope

Power is so pleasant that men quickly learn to be greedy in the enjoyment of it, and to flatter themselves that patriotism requires them to be imperious. — Anthony Trollope

Idle Jeffrey, when asking his cousin for money: "I fear I have not a mercenary tendency."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his cousin, Plantagenet Palliser: "Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not have bred. The man who plows, so he may live, does so because, luckily, he has mercenary tendencies."

Jeffrey: "Just so, but you see I am less lucky than the plowman."

Palliser: "There is no vulgar error so vulgar, that is to say common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. The desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combines with honesty, and they cannot take you astray. — Anthony Trollope

The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is ... remarkable ... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of. — Frances Trollope

The bucolic mind of East Barsetshire took warm delight in the eloquence of the eminent personage who represented them, but was wont to extract more actual enjoyment from the music of his periods than from the strength of his arguments. — Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER LXXII 'BID HIM BE A MAN — Anthony Trollope

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes. — Anthony Trollope

The rising in life of our familiar friends is, perhaps, the bitterest morsel of the bitter bread which we are called upon to eat in life. — Anthony Trollope

Would it not be better to go home and live at the family park all the year round, and hunt, and attend Quarter Sessions, and be able to declare morning and evening with a clear conscience that the country was going to the dogs? Such was the mental working of many a Conservative who supported Mr. Daubeny on this occasion. — Anthony Trollope

I never saw any people who appeared to live so much without amusement as the Cincinnatians ... Were it not for the churches, ... Ithink there might be a general bonfire of best bonnets, for I never could discover any other use for them. — Frances Trollope

On board ship there are many sources of joy of which the land knows nothing. You may flirt and dance at sixty; and if you are awkward in the turn of a valse, you may put it down to the motion of the ship. You need wear no gloves, and may drink your soda-and-brandy without being ashamed of it. — Anthony Trollope

It may, indeed, be assumed that a man who loses his temper while he is speaking is endeavouring to speak the truth such as he believes it to be, and again it may be assumed that a man who speaks constantly without losing his temper is not always entitled to the same implicit faith. — Anthony Trollope

It would seem that the full meaning of the word marriage can never be known by those who, at their first outspring into life, are surrounded by all that money can give. It requires the single sitting-room, the single fire, the necessary little efforts of self-devotion, the inward declaration that some struggle shall be made for that other one. — Anthony Trollope

When you have done the rashest thing in the world it is very pleasant to be told that no man of spirit could have acted otherwise. — Anthony Trollope

A man can love too.'
'No; -- hardly. He can admire, and he can like, and he can fondle and be fond. He can admire and approve, and perhaps worship. He can know of a woman that she is part of himself, the most sacred part, and therefore will protect her from the very winds. But all that will not make love. It does not come to a man that to be separated from a woman is to be dislocated from his very self. A man has but one centre, and that is himself. A woman has two. Though the second may never been seen by her, may live in the arms of another, may do all for that other that man can do for woman, -- still, still, though he be half the globe asunder from her, still he is to her the half of her existence. If she really love, there is, I fancy no end of it. — Anthony Trollope

Her happiness, like that of most of us, was ever in the future, - never reached but always coming. — Anthony Trollope

This was Barrington Erle, a politician of long standing, who was still looked upon by many as a young man, because he had always been known as a young man, and because he had never done anything to compromise his position in that respect. He had not married, or settled himself down in a house of his own, or become subject to the gout, or given up being careful about the fitting of his clothes. — Anthony Trollope

Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret. — Anthony Trollope

As the high mountains are intersected by deep valleys, as puritanism in one age begets infidelity in the next, as in many countries the thickness of the winter's ice will be in proportion to the number of the summer musquitoes, so was the keenness of the hostility displayed on this occasion in proportion to the warmth of the support which was manifested. As the great man was praised, so also was he abused. — Anthony Trollope

A woman's weapon is her tongue. — Anthony Trollope

Having a comfortable allowance from his father, he could devote the whole proceeds of his curacy to violet gloves and unexceptionable neck ties. — Anthony Trollope

If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female. — Jane Smiley

A thunderbolt at her feet could hardly have surprised or annoyed her more. If — Anthony Trollope

Caveat emptor is the only motto going, and the worst proverb that ever came from the dishonest stony-hearted Rome. — Anthony Trollope

Throughout all ranks of society, from the successful merchant, which is the highest, to the domestic serving man, which is the lowest, they are all too actively employed to read, except at such broken moments as may suffice for a peep at a newspaper. It is for this reason, I presume, that every American newspaper is more or less a magazine ... — Frances Trollope

Gift bread chokes in a man's throat and poisons his blood, and sits like lead upon the heart. — Anthony Trollope

I'm no lyrical stylist; you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual. — Joanna Trollope

If he was dull as a statesman he was more dull in private life, and it may be imagined that such a woman as his wife would find some difficulty in making his society the source of her happiness. Their marriage, in a point of view regarding business, had been a complete success, - and a success, too, when on the one side, that of Lady Glencora, there had been terrible dangers of shipwreck, and when on his side also there had been some little fears of a mishap. — Anthony Trollope

CHAPTER XLIII PERSECUTION — Anthony Trollope

She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never descended to construct a decoration. — Anthony Trollope

Colonial governors at their seats of government, and Ministers Plenipotentiary in their ambassadorial residences are very great persons indeed; and when met in society at home, with the stars and ribbons which are common among them now, they are less, indeed, but still something. But at the Colonial and Foreign Offices in London, among the assistant secretaries and clerks, they are hardly more than common men. All the gingerbread is gone there. His Excellency is no more than Jones, and the Representative or Alter Ego of Royalty mildly asks little favours of the junior clerks. — Anthony Trollope

The so-called Conservative, the conscientious, philanthropic Conservative, seeing this, and being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them. — Anthony Trollope

No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be, --truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational. — Anthony Trollope

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer. — Anthony Trollope

Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it. — Anthony Trollope

When one wants to be natural, of necessity one becomes the reverse of natural. — Anthony Trollope