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Bright February days have a stronger charm of hope about them than any other days in the year.  One likes to pause in the mild rays of the sun, and look over the gates at the patient plough–horses turning at the end of the furrow, and think that the beautiful year is all before one.  The birds seem to feel just the same: their notes are as clear as the clear air.  There are no leaves on the trees and hedgerows, but how green all the grassy fields are!  And the dark purplish brown of the ploughed earth and of the bare branches is beautiful too.  What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills!

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book Fourth, chapter 35.

It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste! Perhaps you will say, ‘Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair. Let all people who hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let your most faulty characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right. Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn, and whom we are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the slightest disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and despise with that true ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting confidence.

But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? — with your newly-appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor? — with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing? – with your neighbour, Mrs Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence? — nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes? These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields – on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book Second, chapter 17.

Was there a motive at work under this strange reluctance of Arthur’s which had a sort of backstairs influence, not admitted to himself?  Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged.  In a piece of machinery, too, I believe there is often a small unnoticeable wheel which has a great deal to do with the motion of the large obvious ones.  Possibly there was some such unrecognized agent secretly busy in Arthur’s mind at this moment — possibly it was the fear lest he might hereafter find the fact of having made a confession to the Rector a serious annoyance, in case he should not be able quite to carry out his good resolutions?  I dare not assert that it was not so.  The human soul is a very complex thing.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book First, chapter 16.

It’s been a while since I posted about my reading.  I finished Wolf Solent in the summer, I think, then read A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and I followed that up with Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which was, in a word, fantastic.  I messed around after that, before finally settling on Eliot’s Adam Bede, which I’ve been “highlighting” — to use the Kindle term, though as with most long fiction I alternate between a print edition and the Kindle version — though I haven’t yet posted any of it.