129 Quotes About Victorian

They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.

That thicket gave me my first thought of what a long poem should be. Its unpeopled, life-filled stillness, its silence held by the crash of breaking waves below. I thought of a poem as a place into which one could wander, away from the cares of life. I realized its characters should be as unreal, and as utterly real, as the shadows that people this thicket.

Where there’s life, there’s learning, and the truth is always calling us out of our pride. If we don’t harken, it will call louder, and throw a situation at us. A pebble at first. If we still don’t listen, we’ll get a stone. Then a rock. Then a great crashing boulder. We must learn, or die.

Never be a good prisoner. Not unless you want to collude in your own imprisonment.

Those angels you’ve painted in your mind wouldn’t last for a moment on the streets of London, Mother,” Ellie called out to her. “We’re the devils who stepped in to replace them.

Dogs cocked their legs on anything perpendicular, carriages clopped and growled along the cobblestones, and all with the prevailing aroma of rancid fish quietly melding the confusion together...

It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts.

The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted.

As we entered the pharmacy, I looked over the items on Miss Everett’s list. Preventative powders, toilet vinegars, lavender water, Macassar oil, sea sponges, smelling salts, Bouquet de Rondeletia, extract of patchouli, Grosvrnor’s Tooth Powder, cherry bounce, anisette. They were the trappings of women and in this case, of whores.