Sunday, January 20, 2013

Barchester Towers: 82% Complete

I actually have done quite a bit of reading so far this weekend; I feel like I'm finally getting back on track.  So that's good.
 
The vocabulary word of the day is "toxophilite" which means "a student or lover of archery" (definition from The New Oxford American Dictionary).
 
I have two quote for you today, to make up for the lack of one in my last post, both of which I found humorous.  First:
 
"Men of fifty don't dance mazurkas, being generally too fat and wheezy; nor do they sit for the hour together on river-banks at their mistresses' feet, being somewhat afraid of rheumatism.  But for real true love--love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love that 'will gaze an eagle blind,' love that 'will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious tread of theft is stopped,' love that is 'like a Hercules, still climbing trees in the Hesperides'--we believe the best age is from forty-five to seventy; up to that, men are generally given to mere flirting."
 
As someone with a weakness for older men, I can appreciate this.  The quoted passages are all from Act IV, Scene III of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost. 
 
And secondly:
 
"He had lived too long abroad to fall into the Englishman's habit of offering each an arm to two ladies at the same time--a habit, by the by, which foreigners regard as an approach to bigamy, or a sort of incipient Mormonism."

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