Ian > Recent Status Updates

Awesome line

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful for us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”

Communication is a hot topic in marriage and dating these days; as it turns out, 19th-century English people struggled in this area too.

“Men outlive their love, but they do not outlive the consequences of their own recklessness.”

“One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw…” ahh the 19th century passion has been simmering on low for 500 pages but look out!!

Thank God this one awful character is gone…but I’m afraid he’s left the woman in a bind.

I have reached the point at which I am considering this book may be too long haha.

Still good, but the middle section I’m reading is from what I’ve heard a bit slow.

“What could two men, so different from each other, see in this ‘brown patch,’ as Mary called herself? It was certainly not her plainness that attracted them […]. A human being […] is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.”

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

One of the interesting things about Eliot’s novel is that each chapter contains an epigraph, often a quotation from Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, or some other author, but other times an epigraph she creates herself: a few brief lines of verse or a fragment of imagined dialogue. These fragments anchor her story within a world of stories, a strange, pleasing effect.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT “The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.”

“But the Vicar of St Botolph’s had certainly escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this—that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.”

“I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.”
“I think the goodness should come before he expects that.”
“You know better, Mary. Women don’t love their men for their goodness.”
“Perhaps not. But if they love them, they never think them bad.”

Echoes of Shakespeare in Eliot’s dialogue. Love it.