Quotes About Victorian Literature

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. The whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

Virginia Woolf

#4. Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

Margaret Atwood

#5. 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

#6. Where are the cops when you need them? (Nick)
Probably eating beignets. As the old saying goes, when seconds count, the police are just minutes away. (Caleb)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#7. I didn't ask you if you loved him. I asked you if you liked him. Love is important but like is the more important. If you don't like him, all the love in the world can't make you have a good relationship.

Carolyn Brown

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. He's working a lot harder than I am. I tell these people that we really appreciate what they're doing for us.

Mark Kelly

#11. 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

#12. We must neither confuse evangelism with doing justice, nor separate them from one another.

Timothy Keller

#13. 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

#14. Don't stand up when you can sit down and don't sit down when you can lie down.

Kenneth Branagh

#15. No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

Virginia Woolf

#16. 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

#17. The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort

Katherine Dunn

#18. 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

#19. 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