The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself: these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any …
Category: English LIterature
Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)
The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes–when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward …
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
“Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated;…perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”Mary Shelley “Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery…”Victor Frankenstein The catalyst for Frankenstein Mary Shelley explains, is that she and her husband …
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde none could come near me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde was pure evil. What a …
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Night and Day, Virginia Woolf (1919)
You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, …
Villette, Charlotte Bronte (1853)
I had nothing to lose. Unutterable loathing of a desolate existence past forbade return. If I failed in what I now designed to undertake, who, save myself, would suffer? If I died far away from—home, I was going to say, but I had no home—from England, then, who would weep? Jane Eyre is one of …
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843)
“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” I have seen multiple film versions of A Christmas Carol, but have never read the book. I now …
The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham (1944)
“I’ve been reading a good deal. Eight or ten hours a day. I’ve attended lectures at the Sorbonne. I think I’ve read everything that’s important in French literature and I can read Latin, at least Latin prose, almost as fluently as I can read French. Of course Greek’s more difficult. But I have a very …
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Under the Greenwood Tree, Thomas Hardy (1872)
This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery musicians,…is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand of the personages, ways and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of fifty or sixty years ago….One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical bandsmen…by installing …
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte (1848)
Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveler, or to cover them with branches and flowers. Oh Reader! If there were less of this delicate concealment of facts — this whispering of ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and …
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Classic Laurie 