Delilah’s Reviews > Middlemarch > Status Update

“I don’t think either of us could spare the other, or like any one better, however much we might admire them. It would make too great a difference to us—like seeing all the old places altered, and changing the name for everything.”

“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.”

“It could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.”

“What led her particularly to desire horse-exercise was a visit from Captain Lydgate, the baronet’s third son, who, I am sorry to say, was detested by our Tertius of that name as a vapid fop ‘parting his hair from brow to nape in a despicable fashion’ (not followed by Tertius himself)”

“It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other’s presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning.”

“In three minutes the Vicar was on horseback again, having gone magnanimously through a duty much harder than the renunciation of whist, or even the writing of penitential meditations.”

“I never did like him, and James never did. The corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful.”

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as the self.”

she’s too real for this

“The poet must know how to hate, says Goethe, and Will was at least ready with that accomplishment.”