Mimesis’s Reviews > Night and Day > Status Update

"Civilization had been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that evening; the extent of the ruin was still undetermined; he had lost his temper, a physical disaster not to be matched for the space of ten years or so; and his own condition urgently required soothing and renovating at the hands of the classics."

"Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katherine was able, within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers."

On spring:
"Lives frozen by age, as far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes and colors of the past."

"The imagination of this loneliness frightened her, and yet to speak - to lose here loneliness, for it had already become dear to her, was beyond her power."

"She could not blame him for loving Katherine, but that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him - that seemed to her the cruellest treachery."

"She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy. Twenty words would explain the whole situation to him."

He was stuck dumb by finding that Katherine was quite different, in some strange way, from his memory, so that he had to dismiss his old view in order to accept the new one.

"Yet the wisdom of the old seems to apply more to feelings which we have in common with the rest of human race than to our feelings as individuals, and Katherine knew that only someone of her own age could follow her meaning."

"Long brooding on his failure, continual arrangement and rearrangement of his deserts and rebuffs, had made Sir Francis much of an egoist, and in his retirement his temper bacame increasingly difficult and exacting."

"It'll be such a great day," said Mrs. Seal, with a toss of her locks. "A great day, not only for us, but for civilization. That's what I feel, you know, about these meetings. Each one of them is a step onwards in the great march - humanity, you know. We do want the people after us to have a better time of it - and so many don't see it. I wonder how it is that they don't see it."