What I'm Reading Now:

And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same rom with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Narrator)

Men, like planets, have both a visible and invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer’s orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of acton, and to those monuments of intense suffering which tae the quality of action - like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

[…] our objection to a contrary issue (were it possible) is so strong that it rises like a spectral illusion between us and certainty; we are rationally sure that the blind-worm cannot bite us mortally, but it would be so intolerable to be bitten, and the creature has a biting look - we decline to handle it.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (The Narrator)

Note to Self:

My brain needed a serious break after finals, so I took a break from Daniel Deronda

In that time, I read:

Heat Wave - Richard Castle (loved it)

I’ll Be Seeing You - Mary Higgins Clark (nice, quick read)

Deja Dead - Kathy Reichs (cannot wait to read the next in this series)

Interview With the Vampire - (didn’t like this one; i wanted it to haunt me, it didn’t; wanted the language to be dark and beautiful; but it just felt plain and ugly)

Goodness is a large, ofter a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future: is the germ prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and may have the healthy life choked out of it by a particular action of the foul land which rears or neighbours it, or by damage brought from foulness afar.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (The Narrator)

It was all the morning to them, within and without. And thinking of them in these moments one is tempter to that futile sort of wishing - if only things could have been a little otherwise then, so as to have been greatly otherwise after! - if only these two beautiful young creatures could have pledged themselves to each other then and there, and never through life have swerved from that pledge!

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, The Narrator on Gwendolen and Rex

For Macbeth’s rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill a the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (The Narrator)

How could she believe in sorrow? If it attacked her, she felt the force to crush it, to defy it, or run away from it, as she had done already. Anything seemed more possible than that she could go on bearing miseries, great or small.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (The Narrator on Gwendolen)

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontnet which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egotistic sensibility is a supreme care; but Gwendolen knew nothing of such inward strife.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (The Narrator on Gwendolen)

She had gone to the roulette-table not because of passion, but in search of it: her mind was still sanely capable of picturing balanced probabilities, and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing thrust itself on her with alternate strength and made a vision from which her pride shrank sensitively.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (The Narrator on Gwendolen)