Nineteenth Century Quotes

“Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“(on the portrayal of women in literature) Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“There are no longer any real passions in the nineteenth century: that's why one is so bored in France. People commit acts of the greatest cruelty, but without any feeling of cruelty.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“She...wanted no one—apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of 'unattainable.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“That women differ from men, that heart and intellect are subject to the laws of sex, I do not doubt. But ought this difference, so essential to the general harmony of life, to constitute a moral inferiority? And does it
necessarily follow that the souls and minds of women are inferior to those of men, whose vanity permits them to tolerate no other natural order?”
― George Sand

“Awonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden's voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“...the letters begin to cross vast spaces in slow sailing ships and everything becomes still more protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the leisure of those early nineteenth century days, and faiths are lost and
the life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover; cousins marry; there is the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and both sisters remain, to their great, but silent grief, for in those days there were things that women hid like pearls in their breasts, without children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort (‘I am sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson's loss of mind, or rather of
memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely in our Saviour, he has enough’) and sketched and sketched. Thousands of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and then
the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great Watts exclaimed that here was Titian's peer and Raphael's master! At that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher;
had scarcely had a lesson in her life—witness her angel's wings, scandalously unfinished. Moreover, there was her father's house for ever falling into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her notebook under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran down-stairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, Mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.”
― Virginia Woolf

“She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Paris was the cross-roads of the world.”
― Lesley Blanch, The Wilder Shores of Love: The Exotic True-Life Stories of Isabel Burton, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby, and Isabelle Eberhardt

“With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The main thing is not to be deceived, that is, to lie and and simulate better than the others. All Stendhal's great novels revolve around the problem of hypocrisy, around the secret of how to deal with men and how to rule the world; they are all in the nature of text-book of political realism and courses of instruction in political amoralism. In his critique of Stendhal, Balzac already remarks that Chartreuse de Parme is a new Principe, which Machiavelli himself, if he had lived as an emigre in the Italy of nineteenth century, would not have been able to write any differently. Julien Sorel's Machiavellian motto, "Qui veut les fins veut les moyens," here acquires its classical formulation, as used repeatedly by Balzac himself, namely that one must accept the rules of the world's game, if one wants to count in the world and to take part in the play.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Russian realism was born in the second half of the forties. ... In substance it is a cross between the satirical naturalism of Gogol and an older sentimentalism revived and represented in the thirties and forties by the then enormously influential George Sand. Gogol and George Sand were the father and mother of Russian realism and its accepted masters during the initial stages.”
― D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900

“In fact, vibrators were one of the first appliances to be electrified in the late nineteenth century, not long after the sewing machine but well ahead of the vacuum cleaner. It seems the Victorians had their priorities right.”
― Karen Dolby, History's Naughty Bits

“While in its incessant fear and prudishness [society] was constantly tracking down the indecent in all forms of life, literature, art, and dress, in order to avoid every possible incitement, it was actually forced to think constantly of the indecent.”
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

“If the nineteenth century was a time of education for women, it was no less a time of education for men.”
― Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement

“The elements of Greek tragedy on a continental scale were thus present in the impact of the West upon China in the nineteeth century. It was not so much a matter of direct conflict as of two mutually incompatible views of life and society passing each other by without any contact, like ships passing in the night. The British made little attempt to comprehend the Chinese way of thinking, and the Chinese, compelled by *force majeure* to accept the Western viewpoint in practice, accumulated a sense of bitter resentment which has persisted for over a century until the present day. Each side felt that it and it alone represented civilization, and each found examples proving its point conclusively, the British in the "barbarity" of Chinese law, and the Chinese in the burning and looting of the Summer Palace by British and French troops which was to take place in 1860.

--- "China: It's History & Culture" Morton & Lewis”
― Morton & Lewis

“Our truest and best American antiquity, as the Dominion History of the Union insisted, was the nineteenth century, whose household virtues and modest industries we had been forced by circumstance to imperfectly restore, whose skills were unfailingly practical, and whose literature was often useful and improving.”
― Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

“Girls in Victorian London were employed in all manner of menial positions- domestic servants, fruit sellers, flower girls- and Eliza's depiction of mangles and hot tubs in some of her fairy tales suggests that she was intimately acquainted with the task of laundering. The vampirelike beings in "The Fairy Hunt" may also reflect the early nineteenth-century belief that sufferers of consumption were vampire-afflicted: sensitivity to bright light, swollen red eyes, very pale skin and the characteristic bloody cough were all symptoms that fed this belief.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“In the moral theology of the nineteenth century, kissing with tongues was a mortal sin "in intent and in the deed itself.”
― Hubert Wolf, The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal

“I’ve read all my life, and I read everything. I’ve been so influenced by so much that as soon as I mention one name I think, “Oh, but I cant’s say that without saying that.” I think there are certain obvious big guns, but I really hate to say any one, or six, or twenty. But you could very roughly say that the English novelists of the nineteenth century and the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century were formative. That’s where my love and admiration end emulation was when I started. But then I read all that other junk, too. And I did my college work in French and Italian literature. I never much liked the French novelists. I can tell you what I don’t like. I don’t much like “the great tradition,” the James-Conrad thing that I was supposed to like when I was in college. I’ve revolted against that fairly consciously. Flaubert I really consider a very bad model for fiction writer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“For many country folk, the railway was Paris. Its gleaming tracks brought tales of success, prosperity and realised dreams to the provinces, qualities with which the capital was increasingly seen as synonymous. For a countrywoman like Madeleine, short on money and luck, overworked, and whose future appeared only to offer more of the same, those dazzling steel tracks represented a chance. All at once, resignation turned to hope. Suddenly, Madeleine could see clearly. If she stayed in Bessines, her future was mapped out – and it was bleak. But if she boarded the train to Paris, anything was possible – perhaps even happiness. Jeanne and Widow Guimbaud were horrified when, not five years after Marie-Clémentine’s birth, Madeleine announced that her mind was made up: she was going to start a new life in Paris.”
― Catherine Hewitt, Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

“we may safely predict that Marx himself will become more and more what he already is: a chapter from a textbook of the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one of the 'great books' of the nineteenth century—one of those books that very few bother to read but whose titles are known to the educated public.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“Maar dubbel vloek, maar dubbel schand'
En dieper smaad tot leed
Wie Neêrland heeft tot vaderland
En 't vaderland vergeet!”
― Hendrik Tollens

“Gewis, 'k heb allen lief in 't hart,
Die list noch boosheid plegen;
Hun aanzigt zij dan blank of zwart,
Ik wensch hun heil en zegen;
Maar Nederland wensch ik tienmaal meer:
Dat, vrienden! is mijn liefdeleer.”
― Hendrik Tollens

“Een wereldburger ben ik niet,
Hoe grootsch die naam moog schijnen;
De liefde, die mij God gebiedt,
Begin ik met de mijnen:
Ik knoop het eerst den broederband
In 't mij gegeven vaderland”
― Hendrik Tollens

“Het modernisme rust niet voordat het van de vrouw een man en van de man een vrouw heeft gemaakt, en, alle onderscheid nivellerend, het leven doodt door het onder de ban van de eenvormigheid te leggen.”
― Abraham Kuyper

“We cannot stand idly by and allow our government to be run by a pack of incompetent ministers.”
― Lynn Messina, A Lark's Conceit

“it was pleasing to see the mighty laid low, even if they were from another country and another time.”
― Chris Priestley, Mister Creecher

“What must it be like? Billy thought. What must it be like to be happy?”
― Chris Priestley, Mister Creecher