Background.

Great Expectations
  • In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life‘ is a quotation from Great Expectations (Chapter 29).

Context.

In this quotation, Pip sums up his feelings for Estella.

Magwitch suprises Pip in the churchyard.
Pip and Biddy, who are met by Orlick as they complete the Sunday afternoon walk along the marshes (Chapter 17).

Context.

Taken from the following passage in Chapter 29 of Great Expectations:

Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed again, and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a boy still, but she lured me on.

We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which had so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come home from France, and that she was going to London. Proud and wilful as of old, she had brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature—or I thought so—to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood,—from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.

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In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.