"Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand"
About this Quote
Anticipation is Eliot's quiet villain here, and she skewers it with the cool certainty of someone who has watched desire overpromise and deliver a bill. "Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand" isn't a dour claim that pleasure is impossible; it's a scalpel aimed at fantasy. The line deflates the mind's habit of upgrading the future into a private theater where our wants are never interrupted by weather, other people, or our own contradictory moods.
Eliot's intent feels double: a moral warning and a psychological observation. In her novels, yearning is rarely just romantic; it's ambition, self-image, the craving to be seen. "Beforehand" is doing the heavy lifting, because it marks the moment when we're most sovereign: no consequences yet, no frictions, no complexity. Once the thing arrives, it has to share space with reality - with time, fatigue, compromise, and the inconvenient fact that getting what we want often changes what we want.
The subtext is bracingly modern: the future isn't a destination, it's a projection screen. Eliot suggests that disappointment isn't always the world's failure; it's the mismatch between lived experience and the polished preview we manufacture to motivate ourselves.
Context matters: writing in the thick of Victorian realism, Eliot specialized in puncturing melodramatic plots with the stubborn texture of ordinary life. The sentence carries that realist ethic in miniature, turning a personal letdown into a critique of self-deception - and, slyly, a defense of maturity over craving.
Eliot's intent feels double: a moral warning and a psychological observation. In her novels, yearning is rarely just romantic; it's ambition, self-image, the craving to be seen. "Beforehand" is doing the heavy lifting, because it marks the moment when we're most sovereign: no consequences yet, no frictions, no complexity. Once the thing arrives, it has to share space with reality - with time, fatigue, compromise, and the inconvenient fact that getting what we want often changes what we want.
The subtext is bracingly modern: the future isn't a destination, it's a projection screen. Eliot suggests that disappointment isn't always the world's failure; it's the mismatch between lived experience and the polished preview we manufacture to motivate ourselves.
Context matters: writing in the thick of Victorian realism, Eliot specialized in puncturing melodramatic plots with the stubborn texture of ordinary life. The sentence carries that realist ethic in miniature, turning a personal letdown into a critique of self-deception - and, slyly, a defense of maturity over craving.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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