P.158 I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such
abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually
controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will
sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone. And Mr Casaubon was
certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.
⠀Yet Dorothea
had no distinctly shaped grievance that she could state even to herself; …
where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession
with strange ancestral images and trophies fathered from afar.
⠀But
this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dream-like strangeness of
her bridal life. … in which her own life too seemed to become a masque
with enigmatical costumes.
P.225 as of a dream which the dreamer begins to suspect.
P.226 All existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own, and
her religious faith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a nightmare in
which every object was withering and shrinking away from her.
P.230 For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to
be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this
great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry
shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never
to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a
thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to
be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and
dim-sighted.
P.321 “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite
know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine
power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle
with darkness narrower.”
⠀“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a——“
⠀“Please not to
call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly.
“You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my
life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been
finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I sued to pray so
much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself,
because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already. I
only told you, that yo might know quite well how my days go at Lowick.”
⠀“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather
wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like tow fond
children who were talking confidentially of birds.
⠀“What is your
religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean—not what you know about religion, but
the belief that helps you most?”
⠀“To love what is good and
beautiful when is see it,” said Will. “But I am a rebel: I don’t feel
bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.”
⠀“But if you like
what is good, that comes to the same thing,”
P.381 “That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw—crying up a
measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part
of the very disease that wants curing.”
⠀“Why not? Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land
without knowing it,” said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when he
had not thought of a question beforehand.
⠀“That is no excuse for
encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of hopes about this particular
measure, helping the cry to swallow it whole and to send up voting
popinjays who are good for nothing but to carry it. You go against
rottenness, and there I nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people
believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”
⠀“That’s very fine, my dear fellow. But your cure must begin
somewhere, and put it that a thousand thins which debase a population can
never be reformed without this particular reform to begin with. … Wair for
wisdom and conscience in public agents—fiddlestick! The only conscience we
can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom
that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That’s my test—which
side esinjured? I support the man who supports their clams; not the
virtuous upholder of the wrong.”
P.407 But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of
unfed hope.
P.577 Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had
longed for years to be better than he was—who had taken his selfish
passions into discipline and clad them in severe robes, so that he had
walked with them as a devout quire, till now that a terror had risen among
them, and they could chant no longer, but threw out their common cries for
safety.
P.579 A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his
vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the
desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their
way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when
he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
P.617 but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm
which diverted her ennui. … Men and women make sad mistakes about their
own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius,
sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.
P.677 Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young
lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what
befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however
typical, is not the sample of an even web:
P.682 for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric
acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have
been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and
rest in unvisited tombs.