Quotes & Sayings About Victorian Literature

You can make or break an outfit by not knowing your body type - certain things work on certain people. Make sure you're dressing for your leg-length, hip/chest size, etc. — AnnaLynne McCord

The pagan gods are not dead, but can return to topple science with superstition and modern man with bestial pleasures that pre-date civilisation. — Richard Luckhurst

If you look at the world, you'll be distressed. If you look within, you'll be depressed. If you look at God you'll be at rest. — Corrie Ten Boom

Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations. — Jeremy Campbell

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this. — Margaret Atwood

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading. Stop them reading what they enjoy or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like - the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian 'improving' literature - you'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant. — Neil Gaiman

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible. — Anthony Burgess

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

Don't forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshman come up. — J.M. Barrie

Poetry Calling [10w]
Poetry's not a calling.
It's a whispering in your ear. — Beryl Dov

God is our portion, Christ our companion, the Spirit our Comforter, Earth our lodge, and Heaven is our home. — Charles Spurgeon

Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer. — Judith Flanders

She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words failed me to express), The lady is ugly! — Wilkie Collins

I am my only master — L.J.Smith

Cause I rely on my illusions, to keep me warm at night. I've denied in my capacity to love, and I am willing to give up this fight — Sarah McLachlan

The odd was the ordinary at Alistair Grim's. The people who lived there were odd. The things they did there were odd. Even the there itself there was odd. — Gregory Funaro

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century. — Eleanor Catton

To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that's because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement. — Gail Carriger

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf 's birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature. — Jane Goldman

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens. — Michel Faber

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard. — Margaret Atwood

Last night we were noting, a freelance musician and an unemployed. But you know what we are now? ... Both unemployed? — Yahtzee Croshaw

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes — Virginia Woolf

The whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string — Virginia Woolf

We do good by ourselves, but we seldom do wrong alone. — Phyllis Bottome