The Ladies Lindores Quotes

“No 'Middlemarch' for me," said Miss Barbara, with a wave of her hand. "I am too old for that. That means I've read it, my dear—the way an experienced reader like me can read a thing—in the air, in the newspapers, in the way everybody talks. No, that's not like going into a new neighborhood—that is getting to the secrets of the machinery, and seeing how everything, come the time, will run down, some to ill and harm, but all to downfall, commonplace, and prosiness. I have but little pleasure in that. And it's pleasure I want at my time of life. I'm too old to be instructed. If I have not learned my lesson by this time, the more shame to me, my dear."   "But, Miss Barbara, you don't want only to be amused. Oh no: to have your heart touched, sometimes wrung even—to be so sorry, so anxious that you would like to interfere—to follow on and on to the last moment through all their troubles, still hoping that things will take a good turn."  ”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Ladies Lindores

“THERE are few things in human affairs more curious than the structure of what is called society, wherever it is met with, whether in the most primitive of its developments or on the higher levels. The perpetual recurrence of a circle within which the sayings and doings of certain individuals are more important than anything else in earth or heaven, and where the conversation persistently rolls back, whatever may be its starting-point, to what this or that little knot of people are doing, to the eccentricities of one and the banalities of another, to some favorite individual scene of tragedy or comedy which forms the centre of the moral landscape, is always apparent to the observer, whether his observations are made in Kamtchatka or in London, among washerwomen or princesses. But under no circumstances is this so evident as to a new-comer in a region where all the people know each other.”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Ladies Lindores

“But it would be vain to attempt to describe the struggle that followed: that domestic tragedy would have to be told at length if told at all, and it included various tragedies; not only the subjugation of poor Carry, the profanation of her life, and cruel rending of her heart, but such a gradual enlightening and clearing away of all the lovely prejudices and prepossessions of affection from the eyes of Lady Lindores, as was almost as cruel. The end of it was, that one of these poor women, broken in heart and spirit, forced into a marriage she hated, and feeling herself outraged and degraded, began her life in bitterness and misery, with a pretence of splendor and success and good-fortune which made the real state of affairs still more deplorable; and the other, feeling all the beauty of her life gone from her, her eyes disenchanted, a pitiless, cold day-light revealing every angle once hid by the glamour of love and tender fancy, began a sort of second existence alone.   If”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Ladies Lindores