Alison Rose’s Reviews > Daniel Deronda > Status Update

No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.

Was it alone the closeness of this fulfillment which made her heart flutter? Or was it some dim forecast, the insistent penetration of suppressed experience, mixing the expectation of a triumph with the dread of a crisis? Hers was one of the natures in which exultation inevitably carries an infusion of dread ready to curdle and declare itself.

[Gwendolen, girly pop -- you've got an anxiety disorder]

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Who cannot imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in this object of complete love was not quite right? Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so; perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is hardly a less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

...but--heaven help us all!--we are often unable to act on our certainties; our objection to a contrary issue (were it possible) is so strong that it rises like a spectral illusion between us and our certainty; we are rationally sure that the blind-worm cannot bite us mortally, but it would be so intolerable to be bitten, and the creature has a biting look--we decline to handle it.

And thinking of them in these moments, one is tempted to that futile sort of wishing--if only things could have been a little otherwise then, so as to have been greatly otherwise after!

Who supposes that it is an impossible contradiction to be superstitious and rationalizing at the same time?