Middlemarch quotes
Leave your favorites in the comments. I’ll start with Book one, Chapter 1:
[T]he great safeguard of society and domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
Book one, Chapter 1
Catch Merve Emre quoting Mm at Franzen.
“Humphrey finds everybody charming… what can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I can by advising everybody myself.”
[snip]
”These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.”
Book one, Ch. 4. Mrs. Cadwallader speaking.
Someone else’s book group appears to be leaving quotes on Twitter, too.
“My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less, be married.”
Book II, Ch. 14. Fred Vincy and Mary Garth speaking.
“Then I am to blow my brains out?”
“No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your examination.”
“We are not obliged to identify our own acts according to a strict classification, any more than the materials of our grocery and clothes.“ Book 7, chapter 65
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This is of course one of the Greatest Hits from the novel: “…we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk well wadded with stupidity.” (ch. 20).
Comment by poc2666 | October 5, 2021
I won’t bother to copy the quote, but it’s the one at the very beginning of ch. 27, about the scratches in metal seeming to form concentric circles around the candle flame held up to it,, and “then things are a parable” of how our egoisms believe in providence, as Rosamund is convinced that Fred’s illness was part of nature’s design to put her and Lydgate into close contact.
Comment by poc2666 | October 7, 2021
We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly to the established order. (ch. 36)
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Comment by poc2666 | October 10, 2021
Rosamond, also ch. 36: “And you know that I never change my mind.”
Comment by poc2666 | October 10, 2021
ch. 42 (but the whole sentence gives it the real sting): “he [Casaubon] was not unmixedly adorable.”
Comment by poc2666 | October 10, 2021