Anthony Trollope Quotes

every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter.

Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now. And as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist into my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices; — on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes.

A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything.

The greatest mistake any man ever made is to suppose that the good things of the world are not worth the winning.

If you pardon all the evil done to you, you encourage others to do you evil!

The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because they are so good.

You shall be my pet, and my poppet, and my dearest little duck all the days of your life.

There are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been.

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human, — cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

Wounds sometimes must be opened in order that they may be healed.

I have passed the period of a woman's life when as a woman she is loved; but I have have not outlived the power of loving.

It seems to me that if a man can so train himself that he may live honestly and die fearlessly, he has done about as much as is necessary.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

"I like to have a plan," said Mr. Palliser. "And so do I," said his wife, — "if only for the sake of not keeping it."