Highlights from Middlemarch

I spent a fairly brutal summer reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I didn’t take any notes while reading it, instead I found myself making highlights practically every other page. These are some of my favourites that I share without any context. Just a trousseau of gilded sentences that are, strangely, now mine.

A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

“It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one.”

when a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”

dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood:

One can begin so many things with a new person!—even begin to be a better man.

Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs)

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit,

one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

There are men who don’t mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about.

The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys’ there was always whist, and the card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly impatient of the music.

I feed a weakness or two lest they should get clamorous.

“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray?

if I could pick my enjoyment to pieces I should find it made up of many different threads. There is something in daubing a little one’s self, and having an idea of the process.”

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves:

He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.

clew.

“The theatre of all my actions is fallen,”

Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear.

But I will never engage myself to one who has no manly independence, and who goes on loitering away his time on the chance that others will provide for him.

a shadow cast by other resolves which themselves were capable of shrinking.

Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty:

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike called love, and claim the privileges of a sublime rage which is an apology for everything (in literature and the drama).

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part.

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

It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them.

They made a pretty picture in the western light which brought out the brightness of the apples on the old scant-leaved boughs—Mary in her lavender gingham and black ribbons holding a basket, while Letty in her well-worn nankin picked up the fallen apples.

fix your eyes on some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features entirely insignificant—take that ordinary but not disagreeable person for a portrait of Mary Garth.

You must have it inside you that your plan is right, and that plan you must follow.”

a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a

but a man likes to assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and sermonizing on it.”

a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that 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.

indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.

“There are certain things which a man can only go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other that the best is over with him.

beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly

“To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!”

when a man is at the foot of the hill in his fortunes, he may stay a long while there in spite of professional accomplishment.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.

as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.

she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion

…we are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us,”

for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts;