#victoria

I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#appearance #beauty #fiction #victorian #youth

Is it an endearing quirk among European explorers to imagine that every geographical feature they clap eyes on for the first time is in need of a new name, or is if just a plain silly one? As far as I understand, humans have been knocking around this part of Africa for - give or take a birthday candle- three million years. The existence of a large wet patch smack in the middle of them had not gone unnoticed. How large? Bigger than Lake Michigan, bigger than Tasmania, bigger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island all rolled into one. It is so big that people on one side gave it one name, people on the other side gave it another, and people in between gave it several more. But that didn't matter to Dr Livingstone. Along he came and he didn't ask the locals what they called this large lake at the top end of the Nile. He gave it yet another name, in honour of the elder of a tribe of white people on a small island five thousand miles away. ↗

— Nicholas Drayson

#imagination

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

It's exciting for me to be home in California where I'm from and to be working with Victoria's Secret. ↗

— Lindsay Ellingson

#exciting #home #i #me #secret

Growing up I always shopped at Victoria's Secret with my mom and saw Angels like Gisele and Karolina Kurkova in the windows. ↗

— Lindsay Ellingson

#angels #growing #growing up #i #i always

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

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