How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Dreams, Hopes, and Plans
For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment 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, his eyes mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing along the path to the house. The man was Julius Beaufort. (15.43)
Archer has a habit of fantasizing about romantic moments, only to have those fantasies destroyed by some painful reality, like Julius Beaufort.
Quote #2
He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions. (15.58)
Archer reads a lot of books, which tend to feed his romantic imagination. Also, we're guessing, it's not good for his eyes. Lighting in the 1870s was pretty shabby.
Quote #3
"Medora is incorrigibly romantic. It has made up to her for so many things!" (18.17)
Characters use the word "romantic" as an insult in the novel. It has the connotation of being foolishly optimistic and having an overactive and unconventional imagination.
Quote #4
Archer, as he watched, 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.
"She doesn't know —she hasn't guessed. Shouldn't I know if she came up behind me; I wonder?" he mused, and suddenly he said to himself: "If she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go back." (21.33-4)
Another of Archer's romantic fantasies. But this one, from a scene in a play where a couple is to be parted and the man subversively kisses the woman's sash, is a little nearer the reality of Archer's life.
Quote #5
But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins. (21.46)
When Archer falls in love with Madame Olenska, his whole way of looking at the world is turned upside down. His fantasies begin to have more reality than his everyday life.
Quote #6
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 … (22.24)
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. Say what you will, this guy's persistent in his day-dreaming.
Quote #7
"What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one." (24.28)
Through Madame Olenska, Archer's horizons have widened beyond the narrow scope of New York society life.
Quote #8
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.
Quote #9
"Well, [the Gorgon] opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary— she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness. Isn't there a Chinese torture like that? […]" (29.60)
Madame Olenska describes her own painful romantic past as looking at a Gorgon or Medusa. In Greek mythology, looking at a Medusa could turn you to stone. Ellen's understanding that Medusa turns you to stone with your eyes open is a testament to just how bad reality can be.
Quote #10
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. (34.12)
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.