He knew on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserable a girl like Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and whims. It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked they so often had to do what they disliked. Nick …
Continue reading The Glimpses of the Moon, Edith Wharton (1922)
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 …
As most of you know, this blog reflects a passion for classic literature–in particular, my love for the 19th and early 20th centuries knows no bounds. Every once in awhile, though, I read a review on someone’s blog of a more modern novel that for whatever reason piques my interest. When I read Sandra’s (A …
“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 …
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 …
Continue reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
I feel that I am flying headlong over some precipice but must not even try to save myself. And I can’t…I have no wishes at all. . . except that everything were at an end. One of my biggest accomplishments this year is reading my first Russian novel. I am not sure what I feared …
The land belongs to the future….We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while. O Pioneers! tells the story of the Scandinavian, Bohemian and French immigrants who settled in the Nebraska prairies during the turn of …
Father: The principal thing that we know about this young man—leads us to suppose that, however much he may value your personal merits, he values your money more….If Morris Townsend has spent his own fortune in amusing himself, there is every reason to believe that he would spend yours. Daughter: That is not the principal …
Ralph Marvell: You know nothing of this society you’re in; of its antecedents, its rules, its conventions; and it’s my affair to look after you, and warn you when you’re on the wrong track. Undine: I don’t believe an American woman needs to know such a lot about their old rules. They can see I …
Continue reading The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton (1913)
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, …
Classic Laurie 