scarr’s Reviews > Middlemarch > Status Update

Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman's oppressive liberty: it had not even filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness. Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colourless, narrowed landscape [ . . . ] what if I underlined everything? WHAT THEN?

"But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with. Talk about the weather and other well-bred topics is apt to seem a hollow device, and behavior can hardly become easy unless it frankly recognizes a mutual fascination - which of course need not mean anything deep or serious."

"(pardon these details for once - you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb Garth)"

Book III
Waiting for Death. [PERIOD!]

Mr Garth!??

Loud men called his subdued tone an undertone, and sometimes implied that it was inconsistent with openness; though there seems to be no reason why a loud man should not be given to concealment of anything except his own voice, unless it can be shown that Holy Writ has placed the seat of candour in the lungs.

"He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader [ . . . ]
"Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains."

the scream I let out

"What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?"

"She likes giving up."
"If that were true, Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence, not self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to do what is very agreeable," said Dorothea.