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| Subtitle | Barsetshire Novels |
| First Written | 1867 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| My Copy | hardback |
| First Read | November 06, 2019 |
The Last Chronicle of Barset
This book is incredible, and it's just a wonderful cap to the Barsetshire series. You know that feeling where you don't want a good book to end? It's that, but the good book is at the end of a long series and that book is 800 pages long.
Noted on November 7, 2019
The passage about Mr. Harding's age (p 510-518 in my edition) is so sweet? Heart-breaking? Melancholy? I don't know, but it's the most calm, least bitter description of extreme old age I've come across. I aspire to this.
Noted on November 7, 2019
There are men who are deaf as adders to courtesy, but who are compelled to obedience at once by ill-usage.
Quoted on November 7, 2019
It might be possible that she should bring herself to marry you. Women delight to forgive injuries. They like the excitement of generosity.
Quoted on November 7, 2019
"When a man has any work to do in the world," said Siph, "he always boasts of it to his acquaintance, and curses his luck to himself. I have nothing to do and can go about to see and to be seen;--and I must own that I like it."
Quoted on November 7, 2019
I wonder whether any one will read these pages who has never known anything of the bitterness of a family quarrel? If so, I shall have a reader very fortunate, or else very cold-blooded. It would be wrong to say that love produces quarrels; but love does produce those intimate relations of which quarrelling is too often one of the consequences,--one of the consequences which frequently seem to be so natural, and sometimes seem to be unavoidable. One brother rebukes the other,--and what brothers ever lived together between whom there was no such rebuking?--then some warm word is misunderstood and hotter words follow and there is a quarrel. The husband tyrannizes, knowing that it is his duty to direct, and the wife disobeys, or only partially obeys, thinking that a little independence will become her,--and so there is a quarrel. The father, anxious only for his son's good, looks into that son's future with other eyes than those of his son himself,--and so there is a quarrel. They come very easily, these quarrels, but the quittance from them is sometimes terribly difficult.
Quoted on November 7, 2019
A man who desires to soften another man's heart, should always abuse himself. In softening a woman's heart, he should abuse her.
Quoted on November 7, 2019
Croquet is a pretty game out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledoor and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be made very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making,--providing that the players can be quite sure that there shall be no heart in the matter. Any touch of heart not only destroys the pleasure of the game, but makes the player awkward and incapable and robs him of his skill. And thus it is that there are many people who cannot play the game at all. A deficiency of some needed internal physical strength prevents the owners of the heart from keeping a proper control over its valves, and thus emotion sets in, and the pulses are accelerated, and feeling supervenes.
Quoted on November 7, 2019