Susan Chapek’s Reviews > The Small House at Allington > Status Update

"But there are positions which cannot be reached, though there be no physical or material objection in the way. It is the view which a mind takes of a thing which creates the sorrow that arises from it. If the heart were always malleable and the feelings could be controlled, who would permit himself to be tormented by any of the reverses which affections meets? Death would create no sorrow. . . ."

Bell and Lily talk about story:
"'It always is right in the novels. That's why I don't like them. They are too sweet.'
'That's why I do like them, because they are so sweet. A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be; and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you'd like to get.'"

"There are deeds which will not bear a gloss--sins as to which the perpetrator cannot speak otherwise than as a reptile; circumstances which change a man and put upon him the worthlessness of vermin....
'Deeds for committing which a man is doubly damned, because he has screened himself from overt punishment by the nature of his own villainy.'"

Startlingly timely quote from Trollope this weekend.

"Soon after making that declaration of love at Allington, he had begun to feel that in making it he had cut his throat. He had endeavoured to persuade himself that he could live comfortably with his throat cut in that way, and as long as Lily was with him he would believe that he could do so; but as soon as he was again alone, he would again accuse himself of suicide."

"In them was always apparent that sense of security which women should receive from an unconscious dependence on their own mingled purity and weakness....It might be the lot of either of them to be ill-used by a man, but it was hardly possible that either of them should ever be insulted by one."

What exactly is dear Tony saying here?