I finished Great Expectations this week, and am happy to say I reveled in every word. It made me wonder why we force writers like Dickens and Shakespeare on 15- and 16-year olds. I read Dickens in high school, but found nothing anywhere near as gorgeous, timeless, universal and perfect in it as when I read it this month. I suppose exposing kids to something that they then, twenty years later, decide to revisit on a whim, is a good thing. But reading passages so beautifully (and satisfyingly and painfully) wrought is far more pleasing as an adult than as a teenager. My favorite quotes are below.
"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold - when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade."
"... and went to work again with an air of refreshment upon them as if they had just had lunch."
"I found I was walking arm in arm with the right twin, and that the wrong twin had evaporated into the evening air."
"I know my name to be Magwitch, christened Abel. How did I know it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush."
"I promised myself that I would do something for them one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roast beef and plum pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension upon everyone in the village."
"I saw speckled-leg spiders with blotchy bodies running home... and running out of it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community."
"I wondered when I peeped... and saw the tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom."
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