Historical costumes from the 18th and 19th centuries look so complicated, but when you see the patterns, it's very systematic. I've always been impressed by how the patterns economize the fabric.
Now, as at the beginning of the 19th century, there is a certain discovery of Eckhart and related figures. There are questions as to how far our Eckhart accords with the real medieval teacher of that name, but there are certainly images in his work that help us work our way past several of the aporia with which we're confronted in our attempts to think about God.
An ethic of maternalism was central to the utopianism of 19th century feminists. I don't think that today's women see motherhood as a source of personal power, let alone political power. I don't think that women now have that same sense that their lives as mothers gives them any special power or virtue. I think women see their lives as mothers as an adjunct to their working lives - a fulfilling and important adjunct, to be sure - but something they do in addition to working in the public realm, not because being a wife and mother gives them a distinct edge in improving the world as we know it.
So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.
The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.
Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.
At the dawn of the 19th century, the country was awakening to its enormous scope and variety.
I wish I was better at art. I love some of the great artists of the 19th century and, compared to them, I just feel I lack this technique that they had. They have so much skill.
When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. One of my favorite composers is Wagner - who coined the term "gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work. " That's what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century just kept it going.
I am one of those people who deeply resents not having been born in the 19th century, when there were still open places to explore.
We've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures.
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.
Let's not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That's a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.
If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.
The United States has been a global power since late in the 19th century.
It's a historical thing, up to the 19th century the English hated the French. Then in the 20th century the English started to hate the Germans - as we began to move alphabetically through the map of the world. Now, the year 2000, we are fine with the Germans. . . but the Hungarians are pissing us off.
I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Let's be honest - Bill Murray was onto something when he laughed at Andie MacDowell's degree in 19th century French poetry in 'Groundhog Day'
One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
