anthony trollope
Your happiness is put on hold when it transpires your fiancé failed to correctly cash a cheque. This lasts for 130 chapters. Everyone else is ordained.
charles dickens
An open-deck bus tour of London guided by 15 character-comics repeating the same ‘bit’ for 12 to 20 hours. Then, someone poor dies outside, and everyone from the bus descends to stare.
george eliot
There came over her—as we ourselves beheld the invisible inscription with which every acquaintance, every round and breathing visage upon which one then, naturally, the other of our eyes may chance is inlaid—the possibility, though—what?—too late, now, to entertain the pregnant, sensible vision of change, or escape—the realisation, as she stared into his middle-aged brow, that she had married a tremendous bore.
philip roth
Communists keep finding new and inventive ways to ruin your sex life.
alice munro
But why would a daughter simply stop talking to her mother? For no reason whatsoever?
evelyn waugh
The spectre of God’s grace haunts your attempts to hang out with people posher than yourself.
henry james
You declined an invitation, not wishing, to wit, for it to be understood that you might have deliberately allowed yourself to be put at a disadvantage. Now your ruin is certain.
graham greene
Your only desire is to preserve an inconceivably small piece of your dignity. You are denied this, because of a prior engagement with the British Foreign Office. This novel is called The Way of the Thing.
