Luke’s Reviews > Daniel Deronda > Status Update

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

[T]here will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to – which seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophising.

Why should a gentleman whose other relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic life?

To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from a bridge beyond the cornfields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and...

She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that 'anybody' regarded illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers.

The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the moment of finding an idea.

...Gwendolyn had not considered that the desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection[.]

Oh lord, spare me from introductions mewling and puking on and on about 'shy[ing] away from aesthetic criticism through a fear of sounding prejudiced.' It's not my fault your aesthetics are crap.