Gaudy Night-sitatmaraton II

«I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar.» (28)

«Nobody likes being pitied. Most of us enjoy self-pity, but that’s another thing.» (36)

«Since Miss Lydgate had perfected, or was in process of perfecting (since no work of scholarship ever attains a static perfection) an entirely new prosodic theory, demanding a novel and complicated system of notation which involved the use of twelve different varieties of type; and since Miss Lydgate’s handwriting was difficult to read and her experience in dealing with printers limited, there existed at that moment five successive revises in galley form, at different stages of completion, together with two sheets in page-proof, and an appendix in typescript, while the important Introduction which afforded the key to the whole argument still remained to be written. It was only when a section had advanced to page-proof condition that Miss Lydgate became fully convinced of the necessity of transferring large paragraphs of argument from one chapter to another» (40–41).

«Harriet had long ago discovered that one could not like people any better, merely because they were ill, or dead – still less because one had once liked them very much.» (55–56)

«One First of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly, ‘Num …’ – a particle which notoriously ‘expects the answer No.’» (63)