Reading while ill

Being very sick this month for a few days gave me the chance to plow through a few classics. An enjoyable distraction in the midst of high fevers. Here are some passages I liked:

From "Brideshead Revisited" - Evelyn Waugh
"The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this - come and go with us through life; again and again in the riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is re-rearranged. These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it."

From "The Portrait of A Lady" - Henry James:
"Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel's originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own." (Chapter 7)

"Don't ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don't question your conscience so much... Keep it for great occasions. Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you: the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable income's not one of them." (Chapter 21)

"I may not attempt to report in its fullness our young woman's response to the deep appeal to Rome, to analyse her feelings as she trod the pavement of the Forum or to number her pulsations as she crossed the threshold of Saint Peter's. It is enough to say that her impression was such as might have been expected of a person of her freshness and her eagerness. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine." (Chapter 27) - a perfect picture of Roma!

"Her [Isabel's] old habit had been to live by enthusiasm, to fall in love with suddenly-perceived possibilities, with the idea of some new adventure. As a younger person she had been used to proceeding from one little exaltation to the other: there were scarcely any dull places between." (Chapter 40)

"[On Isabel's marriage to Osmond]: She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above... Hadn't he all the appearance of a man living in the open air of the world, indifferent to small considerations, caring only for truth and knowledge and believing that two intelligent people ought to look for them together and, whether they found them or not, find at last some happiness in the search?" (Chapter 42)

From "The Age of Innocence" - Edith Wharton:
"... he [Archer] did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!"
"Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free..."
Currently reading : The Portrait of a Lady By Henry James