Three sentences

Martin in the Margins has tagged me with a book-related meme. Here's the task:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The nearest book to me was Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. I'm only on p.85, so I skipped forward. Here's the sixth, seventh and eighth sentences (the "her" being Rahel):

"Passion's insistence on absoluteness caused her capacity for novelty to perish, its organ to atrophy. Where hope does not wait expectantly, it is difficult for anything unexpected to occur. Her future would now be prolongation of the past; if the future were some day 'going to appear as the present', all it could do would be to 'repeat the past'."

I'm tagging Noga, Graeme, Andrew, Matt and Martin M.

As a postscript, I should say I was tempted to go be dishonest, as these sentences don't really advertise the book that well. But other nearby books were one by Jacqueline Rose, which I thought might be too much for you to stomach, and a report on hate crimes against London's Jews, which isn't very weekendy...