"Barchester Towers"

[fiefoe]

I adore it when the author breaks the fourth wall and comments on how fiction should be managed. And it's nice to see the signora not be proven a villainess.

• Who can fight strenuously in any combat in which there is no danger?
• long table in the paddock is easy enough, but where will you put Mrs. Lookaloft, whose husband, though a tenant on the estate, hunts in a red coat, whose daughters go to a fashionable seminary in Barchester, who calls her farm-house Rosebank, and who has a pianoforte
• have been as to the preliminary ceremony of an invitation. They doubtless conceived that they had been overlooked by accident, and instead of taking this in dudgeon, as their betters would have done, they good-naturedly put up with the slight, and showed that they did so by presenting themselves at the gate in their Sunday best.
• But beyond these, success in this art of entertaining is not often achieved. Young men and girls linking themselves kind with kind, pairing like birds in spring because nature wills it, they, after a simple fashion, do entertain each other. Few others even try.
• was a great point gained by Mrs. Lookaloft, and it might be fairly expected that from this time forward the tradesmen of Barchester would, with undoubting pens, address her husband as T. Lookaloft, Esquire.
• Who can go systematically to work and, having done battle with the primary accusation and settled that, then bring forward a countercharge and support that also? Life is not long enough for such labours. A man in the right relies easily on his rectitude and therefore goes about unarmed. His very strength is his weakness. A man in the wrong knows that he must look to his weapons; his very weakness is his strength. The one is never prepared for combat, the other is always ready. Therefore it is that in this world the man that is in the wrong almost invariably conquers the man that is in the right, and invariably despises him.
• A man must be an idiot or else an angel who, after the age of forty, shall attempt to be just to his neighbours.
• "You don't know the intriguing villainy of that woman," said Mrs. Proudie, remembering her torn flounces. "But you say she has only got one leg!" "She is as full of mischief as tho' she had ten.
• love that "will gaze an eagle blind," love that "will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious tread of theft is stopped," love that is "like a Hercules, still climbing trees in the Hesperides"—we believe the best age is from forty-five to seventy; up to that, men are generally given to mere flirting.
• The bird is so easily shot that he would not be worth the shooting were it not for the very respectable appearance that he makes in a larder. The signora would not waste much time in shooting Mr. Thorne, but still he was worth bagging for family uses.
• "Is not the blood in your veins as warm as his? Does not your pulse beat as fast? Has not God made you a man and intended you to do a man's work here, ay, and to take a man's wages also?"
• And so the signora resolved, should Bertie fail, to do a good-natured act for once in her life and give up Mr. Arabin to the woman whom he loved.
• 'twas there, and perhaps there only, that he could unburden himself from the ceremonies of life without offending the dignity of those above him, or incurring the familiarity of those below.
• the quality in the tent on the lawn were getting on swimmingly—that is, if champagne without restriction can enable quality folk to swim.
• as he had invariably regarded everything by which it had been proposed to him to obtain the means of living. Eleanor Bold appeared before him, no longer as a beautiful woman, but as a new profession called matrimony... He was to catch her, and swallow her up, her and her child, and her houses and land, in order that he might live on her instead of on his father. There was a cold, calculating, cautious cunning about this quite at variance with Bertie's character. The prudence of the measure was quite as antagonistic to his feelings as the iniquity.
• Or perhaps, if I achieve a great success, obtain a commission to put up an elaborate tombstone over a prebendary's widow, a dead lady with a Grecian nose, a bandeau, and an intricate lace veil; lying of course on a marble sofa from among the legs of which death will be creeping out and poking at his victim with a small toasting-fork.
• With them it is the success that disgusts, not the attempt.
• "Mrs. Bold and my father are the last roses of the very delightful summer you have given us, and desirable as Mrs. Bold's society always is, now at least you must be glad to see the last flowers plucked from the tree."
• "She's stiff and hard and proud as piecrust
• Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.
• the small remainder of this one volume. Oh, that Mr. Longman would allow me a fourth! It should transcend the other three as the seventh heaven transcends all the lower stages of celestial bliss.
• The only fault we knew in him was his age, and as that is a crime of which we all hope to be guilty, we will not bear heavily on it.
• This kind of consolation from the world's deceit is very common. Mothers obtain it from their children, and men from their dogs. Some men even do so from their walking-sticks, which is just as rational.
• It may be taken as a faithful promise that no further letter whatever shall be transcribed at length in these pages.
• She despised the signora, but might she not stoop to conquer? It should be but the smallest fraction of a stoop!
• "Diddle, diddle, diddle, diddle," said he, putting the child on one knee and working away with it as though he were turning a knife-grinder's wheel with his foot. "Mamma, Mamma," said Julia crossly, "I don't want to be diddle diddled. Let me go, you naughty old man, you."
• Mrs. Grantly, who greatly liked the Master of Lazarus, he being an orderly married man with a large family.
• That same day, after dinner, Eleanor, with an assumed air of dignity which she could not maintain, with tears which she could not suppress, with a flutter which she could not conquer, and a joy which she could not hide, told Miss Thorne that she was engaged to marry Mr. Arabin.
• He took the hand that had so gently touched his arm and then gazed into her face as if he would peruse there, as though written in a book, the whole future destiny of his life;
• guide her through the shoals and rocks. She would give up the heavy burden of her independence, and once more assume the position of a woman and the duties of a trusting and loving wife. {Um...}
• He did not call his wife Sue above twice or thrice in a year, and these occasions were great high days.
• These leave-takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory. What novelist, what Fielding, what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Dumas, can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history?
• with couleur de rose, as in accordance with fixed rule we must do, we altogether extinguish our own powers of pleasing. When we become dull, we offend your intellect; and we must become dull or we should offend your taste.
• If ever (the Bishop) thought of freedom, he did so as men think of the millennium, as of a good time which may be coming, but which nobody expects to come in their day.
• We have house-warmings, christenings, and gala days; we keep, if not our own birthdays, those of our children; we are apt to fuss ourselves if called upon to change our residences and have, almost all of us, our little state occasions.
• Few men, however, are constituted as was Mr. Harding. He had that nice appreciation of the feelings of others which belongs of right exclusively to women.
• The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.