"Barchester Towers"

[fiefoe]

At first the book appears to be all bishopric politics, but it turns out to revolve around a marriage plot after all. As to be expected, the couple of eventful parties bookending the novel are the highlights.

• Up, man, and at her with a constant heart.
• he had recourse to an old trick of his that was customary to him in his times of sadness. He began playing some slow tune upon an imaginary violoncello, drawing one hand slowly backwards and forwards as though he held a bow in it...
• and would seem as though she was about to break from her moorings and allow herself to be carried forth by the tide of her feelings to utter ruin and shipwreck. She, however, like the rest of them, had no real feelings, could feel no true passion. In that was her security.
• "Are you a Whewellite or a Brewsterite, or a t'othermanite, Mrs. Bold?" said Charlotte, who knew a little about everything, and had read about a third of each.
• The great tragedian hisses out a positive whisper, made with bated breath, and produced by inarticulated tongue-formed sounds, but yet he is audible through the whole house.
• It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description.
• There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
• Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, at any rate calls attention to the subject, draws in supporters who would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches men to think upon religion.
• As a boy young Arabin took up the cudgels on the side of the Tractarians, and at Oxford he sat for a while at the feet of the great Newman.
• all his worldly interests required him to remain a Protestant, and he looked on his worldly interests as a legion of foes, to get the better of whom was a point of extremest honour.
• that no man can become a serviceable servant solely by obedience to written edicts; and that the safety which he was about to seek within the gates of Rome was no other than the selfish freedom from personal danger which the bad soldier attempts to gain who counterfeits illness on the eve of battle.
• remarked to her husband that one person's swans were very often another person's geese,
• we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.
• Wit is the outward mental casing of the man, and has no more to with the inner mind of thoughts and feelings than have the rich brocaded garments of the priest at the altar with the asceticism of the anchorite below them,
• "Wars about trifles," said he, "are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?"
• There is nothing god-like about us: we differ from each other with the acerbity common to man; we triumph over each other with human frailty; we allow differences on subjects of divine origin to produce among us antipathies and enmities which are anything but divine. This is all true. But what would you have in place of it? ... This dream of believing man has been tried, and we see in Italy and in Spain what has come of it.
• Really, Mr. Arabin, no priestess accustomed to such an excellent well as that above could put up with such a grate as this."
• He connected them with what he called the nasty newfangled method of leaving a cloth on the table, as though to warn people that they were not to sit long. In his eyes there was something democratic and parvenu in a round table.
• When that terrible crisis of free trade had arrived, when the repeal of the Corn Laws was carried by those very men whom Mr. Thorne had hitherto regarded as the only possible saviours of his country, he was for a time paralysed.
• protection was talked of as a thing dead, although he knew within himself that it was still quick with a mystic life.
• To her all modern English names were equally insignificant: Hengist, Horsa, and such like had for her ears the only true savour of nobility.
• Either my reader or I must be a bad hand at topography, if it be not clear that the great hall forms the ground-floor of the smaller portion of the mansion, that which was to your left as you entered...
• Let oriel windows grace a college, or the half-public mansion of a potent peer, but for the sitting room of quiet country ladies, of ordinary homely folk, nothing can equal the square, mullioned windows of the Tudor architects.
• had she been systematically indulged, would doubtless in time have reflected that fingers were made before forks and have reverted accordingly.
• No colourist that ever yet worked from a palette has been able to come up to this rich colouring of years crowding themselves on years.
• comparison might be very just in its proportions which did not at all assimilate the things compared.
• She thought in her own heart that it was only on Mr. Arabin's account that she regretted that he could condescend to be amused by the signora.
• and yet the last little bit of crimped white crape that sits so jauntily on the back of the head is as dissimilar to the first huge mountain of woe which disfigured the face of the weeper as the state of the Hindu is to the jointure of the English dowager.
• It must suffice for him to be ordinarily honest according to the ordinary honesty of the world's ways, and to let men's tongues wag as they would.
• But if there be a time when a woman may let her hair to the winds, when she may loose her arms, and scream out trumpet-tongued to the ears of men, it is when nature calls out within her not for her own wants, but for the wants of those whom her womb has borne,
• As Achilles warmed at the sight of his armour, as Don Quixote's heart grew strong when he grasped his lance, so did Mrs. Proudie look forward to fresh laurels, as her eye fell on her husband's pillow.
• The Signora spitted him, as a boy does a cockchafer on a cork, that she might enjoy the energetic agony of his gyrations.
• Success in love argues that the love is false. True love is always despondent or tragical. Juliet loved, Haidee loved, Dido loved, and what came of it? Troilus loved and ceased to be a man."
• There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
• Mr. Harding said nothing more, but commenced playing a dirge with an imaginary fiddle bow upon an imaginary violoncello, for which there did not appear to be quite room enough in the carriage;
• and she did not think it necessary to dilate with her father upon what was nauseous.
• How easily would she have forgiven and forgotten the archdeacon's suspicions had she but heard the whole truth from Mr. Arabin. But then where would have been my novel?
• Years do not make a man old gradually and at an even pace.
• Why should he encounter such evil for a man whom he loved so slightly as Mr. Slope? Why should he give up his enjoyments and his ease and such dignity as might be allowed to him to fight a losing battle for a chaplain? The chaplain, after all, if successful, would be as great a tyrant as his wife. Why fight at all? Why contend? Why be uneasy? From that moment he determined to fling Mr. Slope to the winds and take the goods the gods provided.
• But how can melodramatic dénouements be properly brought about, how can vice and Mr. Slope be punished, and virtue and the archdeacon be rewarded, while the avenging god is laid up with the gout?