Selected Passages from My Beloved Novels (or, Why the Thesis is Sometimes a Pleasure)

Fanny Price joins a circulating library:

Fanny found it impossible not to try for books again. There were none in her father's house; but wealth is luxurious and daring--and some of hers found its way to a circulating library. She became a subscriber--amazed at being any thing in propria persona, amazed at her own doings in every way; to be a renter, a chuser of books!
(J. Austen, Mansfield Park)


Lucy's famous remarks on happiness:

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.
(C. Bronte, Villette)


Dorothea's reaction to Will Ladislaw's (apparent) faithlessness:

Why had he come obtruding his life into hers, hers that might have been whole enough without him? Why had he brought his cheap regard and his lip born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in exchange? He knew that he was deluding her--wished, in the very moment of farewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of her heart, and knew that he had spent it half before. Why had he not stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing--but only prayed that they might be less contemptible?
(G. Eliot, Middlemarch)


Susan, on motherhood:

I have lost my indifference, my blank eyes, my pear-shaped eyes that saw to the root. I am no longer January, May or any other season, but am all spun to a fine thread round the cradle, wrapping in a cocoon made of my own blood the delicate limbs of my baby. Sleep, I say, and feel within me uprush some wilder, darker violence, so that I would fell down with one blow any intruder, any snatcher, who should break into this room and wake the sleeper.
(V. Woolf, The Waves)