quotes on dreams/hopes

Question 1

quote on dreams/hope (miracle to come)

Answer 1

‘Archer imagined her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck. While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come,’ CHAPTER 15
then before interrupts LOL

Question 2

Quote on dreams (ribbon to his lips)

Answer 2

“[archer]remembered the scene in The Shaughraun, and Montague lifting Ada Dyas’s ribbon to his lips without her knowing that he was in the room.

Question 3

quote on dreams (rustle of skirts)

Answer 3

‘He heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless, leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands, and letting the rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes. He had always known that this must happen … ‘(chapter 22)

And now we’re onto at least the third time Archer’s fantasies don’t work out. He imagines he’s kissing Ellen’s parasol handle, but the parasol turns out to belong to the Blenker girl, not Madame Olenska.

Question 4

quote on dreams (actual life)

Answer 4

‘Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room.’ (26.41)

Now completely in love with Madame Olenska, Archer is unable to function in New York society. He’s blinded by love. Love has turned him into a bumbling fool.

Question 5

quote on dreams (Madame Olenska abstractedly)

Answer 5

‘When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed.’ (chapter 34)

In the last chapter, twenty-six years later, Archer sees Ellen Olenska as a character in a book or a picture; she isn’t an individual so much as a symbol of a life that could have been.