Not Wisely, but Too Well Quotes

“What was it to her whether people would laugh or sneer at what she was doing? No such notion ever crossed her mind; the one thought that filled her whole soul, and left no room for any other, was that the man who had saved her from hell, who had been the best friend she had ever had in the world, was dying, and she must see him again to say good-bye. At”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“And yet, despite all my reasoning to the contrary, I feel that the father and sons in the Laocoon are men and not gods. In their suffering we recognise their humanity. That is a badge that all the bond-servants of the flesh wear without exception; there is no mistaking it. In the dignity of their eternal agony we recognise their brotherhood to ourselves. At”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Generation after generation of short-spanned living creatures has ripened and rotted, they looking calmly on, superior in their unwithering amaranthine bloom—generation after generation has gaped open-mouthed, awed by their solemn presence—generation after generation will so gaze and stare until the world is overrun with a new deluge of barbarians from the far West, or till it comes to its final ending. That happy man, to whose deathless glory it was granted to fashion the Laocoon, must have had in his mind to excite the envy and shame of puny, feeble after-ages, long after he and his chisel should be dust together; showing them what manner of men there were in the old time, in blue-skied templed Hellas.[390] But then, again, one feels inclined—perhaps from aversion to acknowledge that we have degenerated—to doubt whether those god-faces and Titan-frames[391] could have been copied from any mere flesh-and-blood creature that, while in life, drudged away on the earth and had material blood flowing in his veins. Could such stainless triumphant beauty and might have been ever found in our world, where perfection in anything is proverbially unattainable? Rather must it have been some divine afflatus[392] breathed into the fashioner’s soul, speaking to him of a flawlessness of outward build such as had never”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“She would go to the Exotic Court, she resolved: there at least, among the flora of Africa and South America, she could not well be perished with cold nor rendered blue-fingered and red-nosed. One grievance at least would be done away with. So”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“To how few people a premonition of what is going to happen to them, either of sweet or sour, is vouchsafed! Is it a blessing or a curse? A blessing, I suppose, on the principle of “whatever is, is right”[376]—-a blessing even apart from that doctrine, I think. Would the delight of gloating over the coming birth of one’s new pleasures overbalance, even compensate, the aching, stinging pain that the forecast shadows of one’s many griefs would cause one?”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Marvellous pitch of civilisation for us to have attained to, to be able to do such a thing! we must come soon to the highest pinnacle we are to reach, one thinks sometimes, and then begin to retrograde. Well, it is not much consequence to us personally which we do, advance or retreat; it will not be in our days. The”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Man is so entirely dependent on man—so much a part, so little a whole—that I do not believe he is intended to be so self-sufficing and self-contained, so like a snail in his portable house, as some folks say. I think he is intended to take a little interest in his neighbours’ concerns:”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Life certainly was not so jocund a thing to her as to most young women. She had had one or two very hard blows—blows that had knocked her down so much that she could not hope ever to stand up again quite so upright and firm as she had done before; and though no one was giving her blows now, yet the days somehow lagged, and she did not seem to care much whether it were even or morning, noon or night.”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Kate stood by that low bed, looking down earnestly on its occupant—that occupant that was now a person, and soon would be—O, fearful metamorphosis!—but a thing,—why was it that the recollection of her own mother flashed so arrow-swift, so lightning-bright, across her? What possible resemblance could there be found between this poor plebeian, with the swollen, debased features, with the coarse, weather-stained, care-wrinkled skin, and her mother, with her patient, saintly face and spirit eyes? What resemblance indeed! Why this, just this one, which struck Kate through and through: she had seen on both the stamp of the valley of the shadow of death.[301] There is that much resemblance between us all. We acknowledge it in words; but we do not often feel it to our heart’s core; do not realise how near of kin that ineradicable stain of mortality makes us all. The”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“The first of these occupations Kate Chester loved. Give her a book, and she could be happy still. It was one of the few pleasures that remained to her quite intact, quite unmarred by all that had come and gone. Allow her to sit on the rug, and burn her face; allow her to bury herself in some essay, some life, some account of how better men and women than she had comported themselves, had borne sorrow, had borne joy, and done great things, and thought them little, and how, at last, they had departed this life, as she should have to depart it soon or late; and she seemed once more to be the free-hearted, joyous Kate Chester of two years ago, to whom life was a continual feast. These books did her ever so much good; they took her out of herself, took away, quite, for the time, her morbid self-pity and continued introvision, substituted for them wider sympathies, broader fields of compassion; effaced for a while her own narrow circle of interests, replaced them with higher, nobler interests—interests”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“The only course to pursue to make life bearable on such a day, at least for women (I speak not of men, considering their case hopeless, unless they skate), is, immediately after breakfast to draw a chair as close to the fire as a chair will go, without tumbling in, and to seat yourself upon it, with a book. By all means let the book be a shabby one as to outside, else your pleasure will be marred by alarms as to the warping of its fine back by the action of the fire. A shabby book then, either an old friend, whose worth you know well, having gauged it and measured its value on many a happy day before,—an old friend with turned down leaves, and dashes and pencil-marks, and, if you are sentimental, a sprig of some flower, so long dead as to be unrecognisable, between two pet pages,—or else, a stranger with a pleasant new face, whose acquaintance you are glad to make, and let agreeable, fresh ideas filter through your passively recipient mind from its open pages.”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“O, what shall I be at fifty, If I am then alive, I find the world so bitter, When I am but twenty-five?’[236]”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Since this time yesterday she had made the pleasing discovery that she was fast falling in love violently, and as it now appeared unrequitedly, with a man her superior in station, and in every respect unlikely to prove a satisfactory object for that passion which forms the main plot of a woman’s life, and is only a small secondary byplay in a man’s. Yes, the play of her life had begun, and whether it was to be a tragedy or a comedy who could tell?[99] Probably, neither; most people’s are neither the one nor the other,—too prosaically free from any great emotions or grand situations for tragedy, too triste[100] and serious for comedy. To me most people’s lives seem like melodramas without a dénouement. The first three or four acts are played, and while we are waiting for the fifth, which is to be the key to all the others, which is to explain all that is unaccountable, and reconcile all incongruities, lo, the curtain drops! The fifth is played in some other world, and we must suspend our curiosity till we get there. A”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Yes, the play of her life had begun, and whether it was to be a tragedy or a comedy who could tell?[99] Probably, neither; most people’s are neither the one nor the other,—too prosaically free from any great emotions or grand situations for tragedy, too triste[100] and serious for comedy. To me most people’s lives seem like melodramas without a dénouement. The first three or four acts are played, and while we are waiting for the fifth, which is to be the key to all the others, which is to explain all that is unaccountable, and reconcile all incongruities, lo, the curtain drops! The fifth is played in some other world, and we must suspend our curiosity till we get there. A”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“IT seems a stupid hackneyed sort of thing to say—a thing whose point by much wear is worn out, a thing which everybody says, and consequently which it is below my dignity to say—that the half-hour after dinner, when ladies, according to English manners, are left to themselves, is not an enjoyable period; but though it is hackneyed, it is true—at least I fancy so, from what I can gather. To see the evil in its worst shape, read Corinne’s account of the after-dinner female séances at Lord Edgermont’s castle of dulness.[69] It is certainly a true saying when the members of the society are very few and know each other very slightly, and, moreover, have not the smallest desire to know each other any better. Such”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Now for the stuff that he was made of inside, which it required more intimate knowledge to give an opinion of. Not a good man at all. A bad man, if tried by a high standard—that standard we shall all be tried by at last; measured and weighed by the world’s weights and measures, a good fellow enough. O, the immeasurable distance between a good man and a good fellow! A dissipated, self-indulgent man, like all the other men in his set. One who walked along life’s pathway with his eyes glued to the crumbling dust-heaps of the earth, instead of raised in glad expectancy and awed contemplation to those skyey chambers, built all of pure, untarnished gold, which are waiting for us above the sun and the moon and the stars. He might hug himself with the satisfactory reflection that, during the six lustres[60] of his existence, he had not done one atom of good to any human being, but, on the contrary, had done a good deal of harm:”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Look at me now. I have done very well without love, at least love in that technical sense, without this fine passion, for twenty years, and I do not see why I should not do it for twenty years more. That is rather a pretty girl, and the man is not unlike a gentleman. They were the people that sat before us in church last Sunday. They are bride and bridegroom, I’m sure; for they had only one prayer-book between them, and it had an ivory back. What absurdly false pictures novels do give one of love, the drawings they make of it are so out of perspective! They represent it as the one main interest of life, instead of being, as it mostly is, a short unimportant little episode. I declare”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Poor Victor! poor Victor!” she thought; and then she tried mentally to project herself into the situation of the wretched, remorseful Frenchwoman, the coquette whose penitence came too late; the frail wife, whose heart was lying by the cold heart of the gallant young Hungarian noble. “I would not have treated him so; at least I do not think so, and yet who knows what I might do, if I were a great beauty and a princess like her? Some say that virtue is only absence of temptation.”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Great kingdoms grew into being in the old times, at least we suppose so, we having now nothing of them but their dark old tombs. Big men did big things, and might as well never have done them for all we know about them, seeing that they rot now in such unrescued, irrecoverable oblivion. Even the most learned of our pundits in the historical and antiquarian line have but the most shadowy impression of what brave deeds were done, of what wise thoughts were thought, of how men lived and loved, and believed and hoped that dim far dawning. As for the bulk of us ignoramuses or ignorami (as I suppose would be the correct plural), it is a great chance if we know the names of the four great empires that people talk so much about nowadays. But”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“Beauty is a fading flower;”[3] and, applied particularly to woman’s loveliness, there is none more favourite among that bundle of dull platitudes, of insipid, trite commonplaces which enrol themselves under the head of moral maxims. Of course it is true—tiresomely, provokingly, heart-breakingly true; so true as to be almost a self-evident proposition.”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]

“1864 Broughton’s sister Eleanor marries William Charles Newcome; Broughton makes her home with them at Upper Eyarth in Denbyshire. She shows her uncle by marriage, J. S. Le Fanu, the manuscript of Not Wisely, but Too Well. 1865-66”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]