#victorian

If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say, "I love her for her smile—her look—her way Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day"— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry: A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity. ↗

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

#poetry #victorian #change

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books. ↗

— Simon Callow

#anything #books #character #feature #get

And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#victorian #writing-life #change

I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era. ↗

— Annie Lennox

#era #fascinated #history #i #i am

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#around #been #behind #bit #certain

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

— Virginia Woolf

#christiana-rossetti #inspiration #literature #vain #victorian-literature

I've often thought a blind man could find his way through London simply by gauging the changes in innuendo: mild through Trafalgar Square, less veiled towards the river. ↗

— Louis Bayard

#prostitution #victorian-era #change

An unhappy woman with access to weed killer had to be watched carefully. ↗

— James Ruddick

#poison #poison-study #poisoning #true-crime #victorian

I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society". "If society were really decent, he would have been ↗

— George R. Gissing

#victorian-era #women-s-issues #imagination

---In his major phase, he[Conrad] was "ahead of his times" in ideas and techniques;and this was because he was more intelligently and perceptively of his times than most writers then were. In his vigilant response to 19th century preoccupations, he anticipated--often critically--many 20th century preoccupations. He was a versatile intermediary between the Romantic and Victorian traditions and the innovations of Modernism. ↗

— Cedric Watts A Preface to Conrad p

#literary-status #modernism #victorian #intelligence