Monday 28 August 2017

Mixed Motives

'It must be a mixed motive, I think,' said Mr Wickfield, shaking his head and smiling incredulously.
'A mixed fiddlestick!' returned my aunt. 'You claim to have one plain motive in all you do yourself. You don't suppose, I hope, that you are the only plain dealer in the world?'
David Copperfield, ch. 15

[Brookner:] Motives are never unmixed, are they?
[Haffenden:] Your own heroines are given to be unmixed.
[Brookner:] Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They're idiots: there's no other word for them. And I don't know any more than they do.
John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 1985

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