The quotes below are from Benjamin Markovits's Childish Loves (2011). Some are from the 'contemporary' section and some from the 18thC and 19thC pastiche. Can you tell?
- (In my day maybe half the English department, and a quarter of the history department, were working on novels; I was just one of a crowd.) -p. 2
- ... and talked quite childishly about what is after all a rather childish love: I mean, the love of books. -p. 11
- Writers get rewarded according to their exaggerations. -p. 12
- I followed him into the hallway, suddenly filled with students (the noise of them like the noise of ugly birds). -p. 35
- Teaching is like marriage, he once said to me. 'After thirty years of Shakespeare you got to figure it takes a certain effort of the memory to get it up.' -p. 36
- Certain conversations also involve a form of arousal. -p. 48
- There is nothing that makes me more awkward than the duty to be pleasant[.] -p. 68
- I felt stupidly dejected returning home. All society disappoints you, until you become accustomed to it. Sympathy is a great illusion; there is only sometimes a coincidence of manner. -p. 69
- 'I'm a mess today,' she tended to announce when she saw me -- as a matter of habit. A kind of apology for being thirty-three instead of thirteen. -p. 124
- That the long association with books breeds a certain manner, formal, gentle, curious, hesitant. -p. 138
- I liked the way she said scholar, as if it's one of the old professions, like priest or whore. -p. 167
- If you want something done, there's nothing like doing it yourself. -p. 174
- William Bankes likes to say that one needs the shelter of a reputation. -p. 186
- They call this place the University, but any other appellation would have suited it much better, for study is the last pursuit of the society. The master eats, drinks and sleeps, the Fellows drink, dispute and pun, and the employments of the undergraduates are more easily conjectured than described. -p. 187
- It is a great vice to think about money at all, but without it, one thinks of nothing but money. pp. 194-195
- But I write when no one else writes, at two in the morning, or at six; at breakfast or dinner; on sofa or lawn or bed, and in every conceivable position. Even at the mill-cottage, I have fitted up a table and furnished it with quill, ink, paper. -p. 207
- But perhaps I have been unfaithful, in my way -- my heart always alights on the nearest perch. -p. 209
- She was too large to be kept like a cat and too small to be ridden like a horse. -p. 212
- We have all become very dull and the worst of it is, we are too dull to mind it much. -p. 230
- But then, we are often drawn to what displeases us. -pp. 232-233
- No happiness is so perfect that it does not demand more happiness. -p. 242
- We think the problem with adulthood is that we betrayed our childhoods to reach it. -p. 250
- But we have read the same books and that fact counted for more than the other differences. -p. 259
- Outside, across the shadows of the street, a typical college-town figure made his way: either a bum or a professor. -p. 261
- [...] going naked was the best disguise. -p. 262
- Libraries, like casinos, are designed to make you lose track of time -- to forget there's a world outside. -p. 311
- There is always a tax upon kindness, which is paid in further kindness. -p. 353
- But I have always maintained that I am the easiest of men to manage, and she had the art of it: which is, to let me do exactly as I please in the few matters on which I have an opinion, and in all other affairs to decide everything for herself. -p. 367
- I am not much used to making love where it was not wanted -- I don't have the art. p. 375 [You know this is from the Byron section, don't you?]
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