Unit 5: Selection Vocabulary 2

There is only one respect in which I would like you to emulate your father.

TOM: You’re not a sphinx.
AMANDA: No, I don’t have secrets.

AMANDA: Don’t be supercilious with your mother!

TOM: No, he’s not too good-looking. He’s covered with freckles and hasn’t too much of a nose.
AMANDA: He’s not right-down homely, though?
TOM: Not right-down homely. Just medium homely, I’d say.

Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic.

He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighborhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right.

They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye.

For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.

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.

And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the profound dissatisfaction—the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other people—set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an intensity which she could not beat off...

And at once the whole of the room where, for ever so many hours, she had planned with the little dressmaker how it was to go, seemed sordid, repulsive...

...oh, it was foolish—trying to be like them, pluming herself in fact, upon being modest and old-fashioned, and very charming, giving herself up, no doubt about it, to an orgy of self-love, which deserved to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.

He had no heart, no fundamental kindness, only a veneer of friendliness. Miss Milan was much more real, much kinder.

But that was deplorable! That was not to be endured! That made her feel ashamed of herself!