Jemima Barnes’s Reviews > Middlemarch > Status Update

“Oh dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding anyone so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband” - hard relate

“I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living” - the drama!! the yearning!!

“The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over the present quickening in the general pace of things” - George Eliot really absolving me of my tendency to leave messages for days. It’s been going on since at least the 1800s guys !! We’re fine !!

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense the our elders are hopeful about 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.” YES, again, I love her

“A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad oversights in carrying out her intentions; as in the case of Mr Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a stammering condition under the eloquence of his niece” - i love her!!!!!

“people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools’ caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when the world looked yellow under the lamp, they alone were rosy”

i LOVE it

this is so good but such a slog !!