Middlemarch

by George Eliot

nullifidian,

It was said of him that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable.

Strange that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

superficies!

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

This kind of answer, given in a measured, official tone, as of a clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the glories of the Eternal City or to give her the hope that if she knew more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her. There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young, ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory and think that such killing is no murder.

dithyrambs

But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.

lambent