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Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy Book Review.
It’s a love story! Published 1874 Gregorian.
Meet the suitors:
Gabriel Oak. The shepherd, strong as oak, always at the heels of our fine heroine.
Mr. Boldwood. Gentleman farmer, waste of space. Totally taken by her beauty, lured in and dumbstruck by her siren call.
Sergeant Troy. He lies to the women. The women love him. He sets the women against each other and winds up with the finest one, and impregnating the other. He is the bad boy.
Heroine chooses bad boy.
Meet our lovely heroine.
Her name is Bathsheba Everdene. She’s got long dark hair, dark eyes, comely figure in form fitting velvet dress. She inherits her uncle’s farm.
Rags to riches mistress of significant landholdings.
Very fine woman.
In charge of many marriage proposals and engagements. She owns the farm and all of the men in it.
We love our mistress.
But dammit, why did you have to marry Sergeant Troy, that man is a stage act.
We love you. Fine women everywhere. We love you.
We forgive Bathsheba Everdene for being irresistible.
We want you.
We’ll do anything.
We are Shepherd Oak of GabriEL.
Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy Book Review.
Some of my highlights and annotations:
Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) by Thomas Hardy
Book last read: 2024-09-05 10:52:55
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.42%
Highlight: the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright face and dark hair.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.45%
Highlight: The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir;
Notes: Wind in the trees.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.48%
Highlight: Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied that his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.51%
Highlight: I wish we were rich enough to pay a man to do these things,” she said.
Notes: Bingo
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.52%
Highlight: Having for some time known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing void within him, his position moreover affording
Notes: Ripe peaches in summer sun.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.55%
Highlight: satisfying herself that nobody was in sight, she seated herself in the manner demanded by the saddle, though hardly expected of the woman, and trotted off
Notes: What’s the deal w side saddle and women?
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.56%
Highlight: From the contours of her figure in its upper part, she must have had a beautiful neck and shoulders; but since her infancy nobody had ever seen them.
Notes: Hehe
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.62%
Highlight: every morning Oak’s feelings were as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances.
Notes: Chance of love up 7%
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.62%
Highlight: The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man.
Notes: How to capture rival sex.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.69%
Highlight: Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.
Notes: Contract and negotiation.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.71%
Highlight: No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of skittishness.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.72%
Highlight: It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.
Notes: Time is the only answer.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.76%
Highlight: Thank God I am not married: what would she have done in the poverty now coming upon me!”
Notes: Bingo.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.78%
Highlight: He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away.
Notes: Corporate warfare.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.78%
Highlight: but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
Notes: bingo
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.79%
Highlight: It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it.
Notes: Wisdom
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.88%
Highlight: Do you want a shepherd, ma’am?”
Notes: In quotations. Let me be your shepherd.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 10.92%
Highlight: But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions,
Notes: Everything is fake on your smart phone. How does it feel to be fooled by a smart phone?
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.0%
Highlight: glowed like a desert in the tropics under a vertical sun,
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.09%
Highlight: The Young Man’s Best Companion, The Farrier’s Sure Guide, The Veterinary Surgeon, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Ash’s Dictionary, and Walkingame’s Arithmetic, constituted his library;
Notes: Gabriel Oak’s library.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.11%
Highlight: bower
Notes: Pleasant shady space
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.16%
Highlight: He wasn’t quite good enough for me.
Notes: arrest mark zuckerberg and everybody at facebook.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.37%
Highlight: Still, it was faintly depressing that the most dignified and valuable man in the parish should withhold his eyes,
Notes: Hard to get.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.4%
Highlight: The pert injunction was like those crystal substances which, colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them.
Notes: Crystal harmonics.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.4%
Highlight: The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus
Notes: Columbus never touched mainland of north america.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.43%
Highlight: , withered grass-bents, encased in icicles, bristled through the smooth wan coverlet in the twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass; and how the footprints of a few birds, which had hopped over the snow whilst it lay in the state of a soft fleece, were now frozen to a short permanency.
Notes: Great snow scene.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.48%
Highlight: Dear, dear — how the face of nations alter, and what we live to see nowadays!
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.59%
Highlight: women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements — comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty to
Notes: erratic orbits not conforming to known mechanical physics.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.63%
Highlight: Moreover, had she known her present power for good or evil over this man, she would have trembled at her responsibility.
Notes: Blissful ignorance.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.66%
Highlight: But a resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Notes: snake alert.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.72%
Highlight: Bathsheba’s heart was young, and it swelled with sympathy for the deep-natured man who spoke so simply.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.74%
Highlight: The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.
Notes: U know it’s true.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.88%
Highlight: But this incurable loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously. The spring tides were going by without floating him off, and the neap might soon come which could not.
Notes: Neap tide: least difference between high and low tide.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.96%
Highlight: We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialised by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.
Notes: Reflections of light.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.98%
Highlight: mellow hue of an old sketch in oils — notably some of Nicholas Poussin’s: —
Notes: Ask Circe
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 11.99%
Highlight: I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.0%
Highlight: This evening Bathsheba was unusually excited, her red cheeks and lips contrasting lustrously with the mazy skeins of her shadowy hair.
Notes: Well done.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.0%
Highlight: “I always tries to keep my colours from rising when a beauty’s eyes get fixed on me,
Notes: Be cool.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.02%
Highlight: The sun went down in an ochreous mist;
Notes: Very nice.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.03%
Highlight: Have you brought your flute?” she whispered.
“Yes, miss.”
“Play to my singing, then.”
Notes: Yes. Miss.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.14%
Highlight: Ah! such a blessing it is to be high-born; nobility of blood will shine out even in the ranks and files.
Notes: Indeed.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.17%
Highlight: He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing. There was no third method.
Notes: Seargant Troy.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.47%
Highlight: He had also kissed her a second time.
Notes: Once bitten, twice shy.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.48%
Highlight: Liddy’s clear eyes rounded with wonderment.
Notes: Excellent work.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.49%
Highlight: And don’t you know that a woman who loves at all thinks nothing of perjury when it is balanced against her love?
Notes: Sweet little lies.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.5%
Highlight: Loving is misery for women always. I shall never forgive God for making me a woman, and dearly am I beginning to pay for the honour of owning a pretty face.
Notes: Pretty when crying in little black dress.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.54%
Highlight: Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. Boldwood’s look was unanswerable.
Notes: Your silence speaks volumes.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.57%
Highlight: You overrate my capacity for love. I don’t possess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.”
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.62%
Highlight: blind obtuseness of inanimate things
Notes: Smart phone death cult.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.75%
Highlight: beautiful gold-colour silk gown, trimmed with black lace,
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.79%
Highlight: The exquisite relief of finding that she was here again, safe and sound, overpowered all reflection, and Oak could only luxuriate in the sense of it. All grave reports were forgotten.
Notes: You had me worried sick.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.91%
Highlight: A philosopher once said in my hearing that the old builders, who worked when art was a living thing,
Notes: Towers of Nimrod burning and falling to pieces.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.96%
Highlight: being so admirably adapted to the tambourine aforesaid — no mean instrument in the hands of a performer who understands the proper convulsions, spasms, St. Vitus’s dances, and fearful frenzies necessary when exhibiting its tones in their highest perfection.
Notes: Play be a song on your tamberine.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 12.98%
Highlight: It was Nature’s second way of hinting to him that he was to prepare for foul weather.
Notes: Toads and slugs in path.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.0%
Highlight: I will help to my last effort the woman I have loved so dearly.
Notes: Gabriel Oak
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.03%
Highlight: It was the farewell of the ambassador previous to war.
Notes: Calm before storm.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.05%
Highlight: Before Oak had laid his hands upon his tools again out leapt the fifth flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout of a fiend. It was green as an emerald, and the reverberation was stunning. What was this the light revealed to him? In the open ground before him, as he looked over the ridge of the rick, was a dark and apparently female form. Could it be that of the only venturesome woman in the parish — Bathsheba?
Notes: Excellent storm scene.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.11%
Highlight: Thank you for your devotion, a thousand times, Gabriel! Goodnight — I know you are doing your very best for me.”
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.11%
Highlight: contradictoriness of that feminine heart which had caused her to speak more warmly to him to-night than she ever had done whilst unmarried and free to speak as warmly as she
Notes: safe to speak
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.12%
Highlight: Oak suddenly remembered that eight months before this time he had been fighting against fire in the same spot as desperately as he was fighting against water now — and for a futile love of the same woman. As for her — But Oak was generous and true, and dismissed his reflections.
Notes: Fire and water Mars and Venus.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.13%
Highlight: Nothing hurts me. My constitution is an iron one.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.14%
Highlight: with the repose of a man whom misfortune had inured rather than subdued.
Notes: Endure
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.23%
Highlight: Jacquet Droz, the designer of
Notes: Ask Circe.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.24%
Highlight: This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.
Notes: fake it to make it.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.26%
Highlight: Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power, and even the suffering woman
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.29%
Highlight: Few men could have resisted the arch yet dignified entreaty of the beautiful face, thrown a little back and sideways in the well known attitude that expresses more than the words it accompanies, and which seems to have been designed for these special occasions.
Notes: Resistance is futile.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.29%
Highlight: All romances end at marriage.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.3%
Highlight: I must go, in spite of sentiment.
Notes: Perfect rejoinder.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.31%
Highlight: Why, her hair has been admired by everybody who has seen her since she has worn it loose, which has not been long. It is beautiful hair. People used to turn their heads to look at it, poor girl!
Notes: hair and glory and females
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.33%
Highlight: Gabriel Oak, for whom she began to entertain the genuine friendship of a sister.
Notes: Trans relationship. Woman cannot have sister relationship w man. Facts to grow on.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.52%
Highlight: who sat cheerless and alone in the large parlour beside the first fire of the season.
Notes: Oh damn!
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.61%
Highlight: If Satan had not tempted me with that face of yours, and those cursed coquetries, I should have married her.
Notes: we still love you.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.68%
Highlight: Bring up some books — not new ones. I haven’t heart to read anything new.”
Notes: Indeed.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.75%
Highlight: It was too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a man, too animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be called a griffin.
Notes: Among us.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.77%
Highlight: now sparkling and varnished by the raindrops to the brightness of similar effects in the landscapes of Ruysdael and Hobbema,
Notes: Ask Circe.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.83%
Highlight: and began planting them with that sympathetic manipulation of roots and leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman’s gardening, and which flowers seem to understand and thrive upon.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 13.97%
Highlight: infatuation and disappointment.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.08%
Highlight: giving a new and feminine aspect to the pavilion.
Notes: It’s you.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.08%
Highlight: the few yellow sunbeams which came through holes and divisions in the canvas, and spirted like jets of gold-dust across the dusky blue atmosphere of haze pervading the tent,
Notes: Excellent work.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.08%
Highlight: She had been hoping that Oak might appear,
Notes: Always available oak.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.12%
Highlight: It was some minutes before he could counteract his sudden wish to go in, and claim her.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.16%
Highlight: regretting Gabriel’s absence, whose company she would have much preferred,
Notes: Preference.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.18%
Highlight: It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.24%
Highlight: But to give such cool advice — the very advice she had asked for — it ruffled our heroine all the
Notes: Play it cool.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.33%
Highlight: A good wife is good, but the best wife is not so good as no wife at all.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.4%
Highlight: A mere business compact, you know, between two people who are beyond the influence of passion.
Notes: Romance
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.47%
Highlight: She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.57%
Highlight: Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on.Notes: Vaccine death mandate. Face mask goons at your door.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.59%
Highlight: California is the spot I’ve had in my mind to try.”
Notes: With a banjo on my knee.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.6%
Highlight: Poor Bathsheba began to suffer now from the most torturing sting of all — a sensation that she was despised.
Chapter 6: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
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Chapter progress: 14.66%
Highlight: romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.
Notes: Business partners.