You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
Here’s a fender that if you had the misfortune to hang yourselves would cut you down in no time – with astonishing celerity... – an appropriate thing for a spare bedroom where there was a four-poster and a guest a little out of his mind.
The half-indignant remonstrance that vibrated in Deronda’s voice came, as often happens, from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings. Nothing is feebler than the indolent rebellion of complaint; and to be roused into self-judgment is comparative activity. For the moment she felt like a shaken child – shaken out of its wailing into awe.
Love-making and marriage – how could they now be the imagery in which poor Gwendolen’s deepest attachment could spontaneously clothe itself? Mighty Love had laid his hand upon her; but what had he demanded of her? Acceptance of rebuke – the hard task of self-change – confession – endurance. If she cried toward him, what then? She cried as the child cries whose little feet have fallen backward – cried to be taken by the hand, lest she should lose herself.
Mirah, let me think that he is my father as well as yours – that we can have no sorrow, no disgrace, no joy apart. I will rather take your grief to be mine than I would take the brightest joy of another woman. Say you will not reject me – say you will take me to share all things with you. Say you will promise to be my wife – say it now. I have been in doubt so long – I have had to hide my love so long. Say that now and always I may prove to you that I love you with complete love.
I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it goes. I dare say I shall have to retract.
Were uneasiness of conscience measured by extent of crime, human history had been different, and one should look to see the contrivers of greedy wars and the mighty marauders of the money-market in one troop of self-lacerating penitents with the meaner robber and cut-purse and the murderer that doth his butchery in small with his own hand.
Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered your words – that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better – it shall be better with me because I have known you.
The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?
That is a rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd – to be sure that what we are denounced for is solely the good in us.
Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.
It would be very petty of us who are well and can bear things, to think much of small offences from those who carry a weight of trial.
That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing to try for. If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for. Some can be happy. I seemed to see that more clearly than ever, when I was the most wretched. I can hardly think how I could have borne the trouble, if that feeling had not come to me to make strength.
With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.
Ships, certainly, are liable to casualties, which sometimes make terribly evident some flaw in their construction that would never have been discoverable in smooth water; and many a “good fellow,” through a disastrous combination of circumstances, has undergone a like betrayal.
The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over the present quickening in the general pace of things:.
Let us bind love with duty; for duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal.′ So we bound ourselves.
Let the music which can take the possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once more – what does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its absence?
I should like to make life beautiful – I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.
I wonder how girls manage to fall in love. It is easy to make them do it in books. But men are too ridiculous.” Gwendolen Harleth.