

  2. Miss Havisham presides over Great Expectations like a great, ill-willed fairy queen. She is, by turns, the novel's resident corpse, its ghost, its fairy godmother, and "the Witch of the place"—a fury dressed up in a tattered, yellowed wedding dress. She stands, in the Dickens pantheon, alongside Scrooge, the Artful Dodger, and Uriah Heep as one of his most memorable characters.

  3. You long to go on an adventure, but only so long as the adventure is not in any way uncomfortable or inconvenient.

    Orcs are chasing you, but this does not bother you nearly as much as the inadequate breakfast you had earlier today.

    You once fulfilled an ancient prophecy and overturned gender expectations at the same time.

  4. Today in Ms. Frizzle's class we were learning about the body. "What body?" Carlos kept asking anyone who would listen. "Somebody." Ms. Frizzle laughed uproariously every time he said it. "Somebody! That's good, Carlos!" Ms. Frizzle was in a good mood today.

  5. You have just swept someone a magnificent, yet insolent, leg.

    You have interrupted a game of wist to introduce the players to your ward.

    You have been pronounced a social success by the greatest bitch in Paris.

  6. Many readers familiar with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations are aware that he originally wrote an ending where Pip and Estella meet years after their painful parting only to solemnly shake hands and go their separate ways again:
    It was four years more, before I saw herself.

  7. Hi Moira! We went to college together but never dated the same person, which is good, because that would make this awkward! Let's talk about love.

  8. What Friends Say: That they’re sorry, but something came up and they can’t come over after all.


  10. Great Expectations is a book about a boy who is never allowed to finish a meal in peace, and a woman who stays in wedding-dress shape for her entire life. It's pretty good. Here are all of the upsetting meals that are served in it.

    Forgotten Beer

  11. She was a monster. She rewrote everything. I loved her. It began with Texts from Dagny Taggart.

  12. Gretchen: So as far as I can tell, the goal of this book is to be something more sophisticated and legit than Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, while still being more accessible than Actual Beowulf.

  13. Sometimes, when I want to find out whether or not my students have actually read their assigned Emma pages, I mention that I’ve been compared to Miss Woodhouse.  Those who have read past the first page look absolutely horrified, and their expression is a perfect reflection of mine when I came to the sentence that gave me the first inkling the man I was convinced was my destiny was not.

  14. If there's one thing life has taught me, it's that high school literature teachers love convincing you that Middle English is close enough to Modern English for you to stumble along without a translation through Chaucer's prologue, and I'm here to tell you that is some nonsense and you don't have to stand for it.

  15. Originally.
