Nov 29
Is there anyone who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then—when it was so long from one midsummer to another—what he felt when his schoolfellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere willfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays when he didn’t know how to amuse himself and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that ‘half,’ although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already?
—George Eliot, from The Mill on the Floss