The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.
I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.
Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors... Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat... What then was music created for? Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voic...
The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they ge...
They don't take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don't; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn't give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn. ("Kentucky's Ghost")
A man need not be ashamed of moist eyes when he gazes on the face of some loved one who is far away. It's human. It shows a kindly heart, an impressionable mind! ("The Doomed Man")
It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. ...
That he will haunt the footsteps of his enemy after death is the one revenge which a dying man can promise himself; and if men had power thus to avenge themselves the earth would be peopled with phantoms. ("Eveline's Visitant")
He was a student - such things as happened to him, happen sometimes to students. He was a German - such things as happened to him, happen sometimes to Germans. He was young, handsome, studious, enthusiastic, metaphysical, reckless, unbelieving, heart...
The feminist challenge was sweeping: it embraced education and occupation, together with legal, political, and social status. It even dared broach the subject of equality in personal, and especially matrimonial, relationships. Such assertiveness was ...
What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps spurious, but nevertheless compelling dynamic between details which can undermine the ability of form to imp...
We are always sure that the heroine is fiery and passionate, which is quite an achievement when the plot has had to keep her passive, inactive and loveless for long stretches. Up to the point when Jane's love declares itself, the novel establishes th...
He couldn't drive the horror of cannibalism from his brain, just as he couldn't wholly suppress a simple observation that seemed to rebut their savagery: these were the nicest man-eating barbarians a lonely wanderer could ever hope to encounter.
The weather appeared to have somewhat cleared up; the rain no longer fell, a fresh wind swept the streets, and the moon, now and then surrounded by dark clouds, now and then shining in full brilliancy, shed its rays, smooth and cold as blades of stee...
Indeed, and crucially so, the serial form took the control of the novel away from the reader and left him in an imagined space that could not be thought of in terms of the physical space still to be read. At the end of each instalment the reader woul...
When we discuss a novel it is only partially to hear another person's 'view', it is much more to find out what we ourselves think in order to possess the text more completely. Such a possession is then a composite one, it is the book itself and the a...
I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
Steampunk is Victorian science fiction
The Victorian era is the sexiest age for me, but I also like a woman in a pair of jeans.
I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.
