"Gaudy Night"

[fiefoe]

I would have enjoyed the book more if I had a more classic education, ("Placetne, magistra?") or the book didn't live in Harriet's head so much. The first half of this long book was quite a slog, and things only picked up when Wimsey's nephew came on the scene.

For once I guessed who the bad guy is, but it's still a shame to bury a nice romance in a detective novel like this, (however idealized this romance was.)

• Harriet Vane, who had taken her First in English and gone to London to write mystery fiction, to live with a man who was not married to her, and to be tried for his murder amid a roar of notoriety?
• But Harriet had broken all her old ties and half the commandments, dragged her reputation in the dust and made money, had the rich and amusing Lord Peter Wimsey at her feet, to marry him if she chose, and was full of energy and bitterness and the uncertain rewards of fame.
• the blatancy of red brick sprawled along the highway was a reminder that the present builds inexorably over the empty fields of the past.
• And here, no change at all—only the heartless and indifferent persistence of man’s handiwork.
• And she will remember me as I am—hardened. She told me I looked successful. I know what that means.”
• “I suppose,” thought Harriet, “she had one of those small, summery brains, that flower early and run to seed.
• It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.”
• The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things.
• and all statesmanship is compromise.
• Beautiful Thought. That sort of thing. Full of bad syntax.” “Oh, lord! Yes—that’s pretty awful, isn’t it? I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar.”
• “Who mentioned Planck’s constant a little time ago?” “I did, and I’m sorry for it. I call it a revolting little object.”
• a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.” “Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.” “I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings.”
• The checkered shadow dropped off them, like the dropping of linked silver chains. Each after each, from all the towers of Oxford, clocks struck the quarter-chime, in a tumbling cascade of friendly disagreement.
• Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.”
• a girl with a face like eager flame who was dressed with a maddening perversity of wrongness, but who one day would undoubtedly hold the world in her hands for good or evil.
• I shall, with your permission, continue to propose to you, at decently regulated intervals—as a birthday treat, and on Guy Fawkes Day and on the Anniversary of the King’s Accession. But consider it, if you will, as a pure formality.
• One First of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly. “Num …?”—a particle which notoriously “expects the answer No.” Harriet, rummaging the Grammar book for “polite negatives,” replied, still more briefly, “Benigne.”
• You will have to deny something, if you intend to be like Caesar’s sacrifice.” “Caesar’s …?” “A beast without a heart.
• Must one.. seek a compromise, merely to preserve one's sanity? Then one was doomed forever to this miserable inner warfare, with confused noise and garments rolled in blood—and, she reflected drearily, with the usual war aftermath of a debased coinage, a lowered efficiency and unstable conditions of government.
• Responsibility bores ’em. Before the War they passionately had College Meetings about everything. Now, they won’t be bothered. Half the old institutions, like the College debates and the Third Year Play, are dead or moribund.
• “If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of something like dentists or gardening. I wonder what are the unthinkable depths of awfulness that can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter’s embraces.
• Emily seemed doubtful. She was one of those people who never feel they have said a thing till they have said it three times over.
• After all, she has got to give some guarantee of sensible behavior if I’m not to report her to the Dean. A spot of benevolent blackmail is indicated, I fancy.”
• owns a black semi-evening crêpe de Chine, figured with bunches of red and green poppies, with a draped cross-over front, deep hip-yoke and flared skirt and sleeves about three years out of date?”
• ‘His lordship has drunk his bath and gone to bed again.’ That’s about it,
• “She’s awfully kind. But I’m always having to be grateful to her. It’s very depressing. It makes me want to bite.”
• “As Sherlock Holmes said on another occasion: ‘I think we must ask for an amnesty in that direction.’”
• From now on, I shall consider nothing but the value of the Thing-in-Itself, unmoved by any pressure of public opinion.” Having, in this pleasant manner, confessed his sins and promised amendment, Mr. Rogers gracefully led the conversation to topics of general interest,
• “Terrible,” said Miss Lydgate. “I can’t imagine anything more dreadful to an honest person’s feelings.” “Then,” said Harriet, “we must hope, for Mrs. Jukes’s sake, she was as guilty as he was.”
• “If one’s genuinely interested one knows how to be patient, and let time pass, as Queen Elizabeth said. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience,
• “The worst of being a job,” said Miss de Vine, “is the devastating effect it has on one’s character. I’m very sorry for the person who is somebody else’s job; he (or she, of course) ends by devouring or being devoured,
• “Add on, say a hundred and fifty, estimated repairs to car, and then we’ll see. Oh, hell! what have we here?” “The portrait of a blinking idiot,” said Harriet, irresistibly. “Amazin’ fellow, Shakespeare.
• if not, I have other things to do.” “Very well. We will continue to rob Peter to pay all.
• It was about a swimming instructor at a watering-place, who had contracted such an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing-beauties that it completely inhibited all his natural emotions. So he got a job on a whaler and fell in love at first sight with an Eskimo, because she was such a beautiful bundle of garments.
• She admired the strange nexus of interests that unites the male half of mankind into a close honeycomb of cells, each touching the other on one side only, and yet constituting a tough and closely adhering fabric.
• sat looking over the spires of the city, deep-down, fathom-drowned, striking from the round bowl of the river-basin, improbably remote and lovely as the towers of Tirnan-Og beneath the green sea-rollers.
• She had her image—the world sleeping like a great top on its everlasting spindle—and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.
• “and I can assure you that we haven’t been climbing trees.” A wicked facility in quotation tempted her to add “except in the Hesperides”;
• she knew the ancient dread of Artemis, moon-goddess, virgin-huntress, whose arrows are plagues and death.
• if only one could root one’s self in here among the grass and stones and do something worth doing, even if it was only restoring a lost breathing for the love of the job and nothing else.”
• My ear is open like a greedy shark to catch the tunings of a voice divine.” “Great heavens! Where did you find that?” “That, though you might not believe it, is the crashing conclusion of a sonnet by Keats.
• I admit it is better fun to punt than to be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.”
• It was quite true that the spontaneous affections of Reggie Pomfret had, somehow, made it easier to believe that Peter’s own feelings might be something more than an artist’s tenderness for his own achievement. But it was indecent of Peter to reach that conclusion so rapidly. She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.
• He was silent for a moment, and then said in a changed voice: “Was that a bow drawn at a venture?” “A good shot?” “Whang in the gold. Between the joints of the harness …If you would paddle a little on your side it would make it handier to steer.” “Sorry …Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?” “So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.
• “Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be.”
• Men have died and the worms have eaten them, but not for early rising.
• But you’re sure I’d rather die than make such an embarrassing pretense.” “Well, wouldn’t you?” “And on the whole you’d rather see me dead than embarrassed.” “That is probably another form of egotism. But I am entirely at your service.”
• “Yes; you are practically without endowments?” The question was so offered as to include the Dean, who said cheerfully: “Quite right. All done by cheeseparing.” “That being so,” he said, seriously, “even to admire seems to be a kind of impertinence.
• “Hush! there is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one’s own limitations.”
• “That phenomenon,” he said, readily, “comes within my own sphere of knowledge. It occurs because the human torso possesses a higher factor of variability than the ready-made shirt. The explosive sound you mention is produced when the shirt-front is slightly too long for the wearer. The stiff edges, being forced slightly apart by the inclination of the body, come back into contact with a sharp click, similar to that emitted by the elytra of certain beetles. It is not to be confused, however, with the ticking of the Death-watch, which is made by tapping with the jaws and is held to be a love-call. The clicking of the shirt-front has no amatory significance,
• “But epic actions are all fought by the rearguard—at Roncevaux and Thermopylae.”
• everybody’s gravity. “How about the Forged Decretals … Chatterton … Ossian … Henry Ireland … those Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets the other day …?”
• (And, damn him! how dared he pick up her word “sleep” and use it four times in as many lines, and each time in a different foot, as though juggling with the accent-shift were child’s play?
• That, then, was what he wanted her for. For some reason, obscure to herself and probably also to him, she had the power to force him outside his defenses... She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.
• those bewitchments.” “‘The reason no man knows, let it suffice What we behold is censured by our eyes.’ To be possessed is an admirable reason for possessing.”
• a garden, as Bacon observes, is the purest of human pleasures and the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man;
• I who told you that of all devils let loose in the world there was no devil like devoted love. …I don’t mean passion. Passion’s a good, stupid horse that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels on Sundays. But love’s a nervous, awkward, over-mastering brute; if you can’t rein him, it’s best to have no truck with him.”
• each in her own way had recognized the same thing: six centuries of possessiveness, fastened under the yoke of urbanity.
• It was not to Philip she had submitted, so much as to a theory of living. The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles. To subdue one’s self to one’s own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltiness of those dead sea apples.

The first couple of chapters of Busman's Honeymoon make a nice 番外。
__ “Even if it is the twilight of the world, before night falls I will sleep in your arms.” …
__ Said she was afraid she never would learn to behave like other people, but Peter had only said it was the first time his features had ever been prized above rubies.
__ Peter’s final comment had been: “I have now completely given myself away. No English vocabulary. No other Englishwoman. And that is the most I can say for myself.”