Sublime

It is true Lydgate was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting his prescriptions of diet to their small means; but, dear me! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable – is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other? Expendi

She occupies her days with clothing – in the mending and embellishment of it for purposes theatrical and ecclesiastical, in ironing and starching it; even sometimes in constructing new garments out of old ones, and wearing them through Aldleigh in the knowledge that she is seen and admired and enviously mocked.

Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between what for the sake of variety I will call goose and gander: especially on the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander.

cholera: in her notebook, ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, George Eliot noted the appearance of cholera in England in 1831–2.

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

These little things are great to little man. GOLDSMITH247

It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look fast.

I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.

I don’t love writing; I love having a problem I believe I might someday write my way out of.