it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.
Everything in life is able to connect to one another and it's important for people to look for those connections in order to discover new and deeper things about life. Whether or not there is a reason for things being connected does not matter, just the fact that things are is interesting.
One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’.
One could sense the confidence when reading a man's writing, but then narrator goes on to talk about a shadow on the page- the letter I. What does she mean by this. Perhaps men are too full of themselves?
No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own;
We live in an age where gender is a huge topic and issues of sexism are prevalent in everything.
Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. But some of these states of mind seem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others.
Minds are never fixated on one single thing and are constantly darting from one thing to the next. We can't always helps what comes into our head and how that makes us feel, causing some states of minds "to be less comfortable than others". I believe that's what the author is talking about? Also, is it a good thing to feel these uncomfortable states of minds? What if we were always content?
one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind.
What does this mean? How can thinking about 2 different things affect the unity of the mind?
They all seemed separate, self-absorbed, on business of their own.
Everyone is set in their ways and are used to how things are. Change is never easy so people stick to what they know, and that is to just take care of themselves and not worry about issues that don't affect them. Is that a good way to live?
The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels.
What does this mean?
sedulous
Showing dedication
What a waste that the woman who wrote ‘the best bred women are those whose minds are civilest’ should have frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till the people crowded round her coach when she issued out
What exactly does this mean?
But how could she have helped herself?
Is it her fault for feeling so bitter and upset? Is it anyone's fault for not staying more positive when their situation/life just sucks?
For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.
I think this should make people wonder about sanity and if the crazy people are really the crazy ones. Often in history the most extraordinary things have been discovered or done by someone who was disliked because they were different or had a seperate way of thinking than everyone else
For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.
...this is why EVERYONE deserves an education
I never knew that it was thought by some that women did not have souls and were simply incapable of education. I understood it was thought that men were simply smarter than women, but not that women were altogether incapable of intellect as a community.
Les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes —
Women are extreme, they are better or worse than the men.
London was like a machine.
Does the author mean this to be a good thing or a bad thing?
What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art
Does art only come from a place of pain? Can it ever just be from a place of happiness? Don't you need pain to understand and feel happiness? It's impossible to feel true happiness without suffering.
But one needed answers, not questions
You can't have answers without questions
One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth.
I think this means that one needs to take all their personal feelings aside in order to get at what is the truth. I feel that is true in all aspects of life.
Why does the author talk about these two poems specifically? What do you think they're about?
The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me.
Seeing the cat caused the narrator to have a feeling of realization
Why does the author spend so much time describing foods? What is the deeper meaning/significance?
coffers
A small chest for holding valuables
dons
a university teacher
verger
an official in a church
Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger
How would you feel if you were told you could not enter somewhere because of your gender?
It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege.
Words have set meanings and it's shocking for anyone to use words in ways that they were not meant to be
I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.
What is the author talking about? What do you believe the thought was about and why is she not telling us?
idiosyncrasies
a way of thinking or a form of behavior that is specific to an individual