Middlemarch Dissatisfaction Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others. (1.6.78)

Here's yet another passage in which the narrator uses the first person plural ("we") to incorporate the reader, the narrator, and all the characters in one universal statement. She says that everyone is disappointed by something everyday, but that we all hide it to keep up a strong front. The narrator makes disappointment and dissatisfaction into a universal human condition, rather than something that afflicts a few people every now and then.

Quote #5

[…] the Vicar felt himself not altogether in the right vocation. (2.17.27)

Mr. Farebrother's dissatisfaction with his life stems from a mistake he made a long time ago, well before the start of the novel. He's in the wrong profession, and there's no good way to switch professions in late middle age. Nowadays, if you don't like your job, you can always go back to school and start again (it might be difficult, but it's generally possible). But Mr. Farebrother is trapped by that early decision. He's a good person, but he wasn't meant to be a clergyman. He should have been a biologist, because that's where his interests and passions really lie.

Quote #6

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meager Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. (2.20.5)

Dorothea isn't able to comprehend the splendors of Rome because of the limitations of her "Protestant" education. All of the art and history in Rome seems to be just beyond her ability to grasp. Besides, she's "preoccup[ied] with her own "personal lot." So Rome, the narrator suggests, is an acquired taste – you have to go in already knowing something about its history in order to appreciate it. Dorothea's dissatisfaction while she's in Rome stems from her inability to get her head around it all – it's just too overwhelming.