There is something both gratifying & humiliating in watching a man who has taken you for a routinely silly woman begin to take you seriously, Frederica thought.
There is something both gratifying & humiliating in watching a man who has taken you for a routinely silly woman begin to take you seriously, Frederica thought.
Part of the joy of falling in love--for the intelligent, the watchers, the judicious--is the delicious license to set something above thinking clearly, the pleasure of being driven, taken over, overwhelmed.
They had no idea what it was to be a woman. In later years, in the light of that indiscriminate loving interest lavished on all female activity, all female uses of the self, which is the most unequivocally agreeable result of literary feminism, it became possible to see both Miss Chiswick & little brown Signora Cavelli née Brill as heroines of some kind, upholders of differing principles.
[2 of 2] ...bore the same kind if bizarrely streamlined relations to real creatures. Marcus thought of normality as a complex pattern on tracing paper, peaks, rounds, interlocking jigsaw parts, which, when slid over the mess of the actual graph or representation of what was, produced a thickened shifty outline, a jigging blurring worse than the original.
[1 OF 2] Normal was what people said some of their actions & relations were, from time to time, & in Marcus' experience, what they said they were bore only a vague relation to their actual forms & configurations. Bill would say what fathers & sons, sisters & brothers, boys & girls did or were & would scream quite other definitions or labels. The idea of the boy at school, of the "friend," of the "good sport," of the "bright chap," ...
George Eliot, Stephanie thought, was a good hater. She looked long & intelligently at what she hated, with curiosity to see exactly what it was, & the necessary detachment to imagine it from within & without, & those two breeding a kind of knowledge that was love. George Eliot had loved the bonnets & sprigged china--because she knew them, or because writing them down gave her power over them, made her gentle and generous to their meaning?