Showing posts tagged George Eliot
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What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Eliot (via quotefullness)

If only this felt more true sometimes.

(Reblogged from theatrecollage)
millionsmillions: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” —George Eliot

millionsmillions:

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

—George Eliot

(Reblogged from millionsmillions)

I finished Middlemarch!!!

Reading this novel took much longer than I expected.  I don’t know why.  Probably because I didn’t factor in the time for taking notes on each chapter, then flagging each theme, then keeping notecards with more notes on more themes on them.  Plus all the time not reading, like normal summers, because I have a full-time internship, a full-length play to write, fellowship applications, a city to explore with Rice and Houston friends, and Doctor Who.

I really didn’t mean for this to be a rant.  I am truly happy to be busy this summer.  And more than anything, I am celebrating this victory.  Finishing a 785 page Victorian novel is no small feat, even for an English major focusing on Victorian literature.

Oh yeah, and in case you haven’t read it, it was awesome.

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Until that wretched yesterday—except the moment of vexation long ago in the very same room and in the very same presence—all their vision, all their thought of each other, had been as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on white lilies, where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered. But now—would Dorothea meet him in that world again?
George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book Eight, Chapter 82, last paragraph
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He wheeled round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her, with the tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back, looking fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.
George Eliot, Middlemarch Book 8, Ch. 78.
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Mr. Garth: Most uncommon … She said a thing I often used to think when I was a lad: ‘Mr. Garth, I should like to feel, if I lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece of land and built a great many cottages, because the work is of a healthy kind while it is being done, and after it is done, men are the better for it’ …
Mrs. Garth: But womanly, I hope.
George Eliot, Middlemarch  Book V, Chapter LVI
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Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.
George Eliot, Middlemarch Book II, Chapter XXIX
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Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of men.
George Eliot’s translation of Theocritusfrom Idylls and the “motto for Book II, Ch. XXVI of Middlemarch.

Sorry Not Sorry for the Middlemarch Spam

I have posted a lot of Middlemarch quotes already.  I would say that I’m sorry, but it’s only going to get worse.  I’m reading it for my senior thesis and so far almost every new chapter is quotable.  This is how I’m making over 700 pages of Victorian Literature even more exciting!!!

Slang in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Book I, Ch. VI)

  • Fred Vincy: All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.
  • Rosamund Vincy: There is correct English: that is not slang.
  • Fred: I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poetry.
  • Rosamund: You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.
  • Fred: Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter.
  • Rosamund: Of course you can call it poetry if you like.
  • Fred: Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang.