The Mill on the Floss

by George Eliot

That’s the fault I have to find wi’ you, Bessy: if you see a stick i’ the road, you’re allays thinkin’ you can’t step over it.

Maggie was incessantly tossing her head to keep the dark heavy locks out of her gleaming black eyes – an action which gave her very much the air of a small Shetland pony.

So of her curled fronts. Mrs Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day world from under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

The next disagreeable was confined to his feminine companions: it was the mounting of the polished oak stairs, which had very handsome carpets rolled up and laid by in a spare bedroom, so that the ascent of these glossy steps might have served in barbarous times as a trial by ordeal from which none but the most spotless virtue could have come off with unbroken limbs.

I say nothing against Mr Stelling’s theory: if we are to have one regimen for all minds his seems to me as good as any other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it.

She presently made up her mind to skip the rules in the Syntax, – the examples became so absorbing. These mysterious sentences snatched from an unknown context, – like strange horns of beasts and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some far-off region, gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their own, which she could learn to interpret.

that it is no novelty in my life speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.

the plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it had been heroically snatched from the nether fires into which it had been thrown by dyspeptic puritans;

They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

Mrs Glegg had on her fuzziest front, and garments which appeared to have had a recent resurrection from rather a creasy form of burial: a costume selected with the high moral purpose of instilling perfect humility into Bessy and her children.

there was no indulgence, no fondness, such as she imagined when she fashioned the world afresh in her own thoughts. In books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt: it seemed to be a world where people behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love and that did not belong to them.

Our life is determined for us – and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do.’

‘It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?

It is very sweet to have people love us.

If any woman could love him – surely Maggie was that woman: there was such wealth of love in her, and there was no one to claim it all. Then – the pity of it that a mind like hers should be withering in its very youth, like a young forest tree, for want of the light and space it was formed to flourish in! Could he not hinder that, by persuading her out of her system of privation? He would be her guardian angel; he would do anything, bear anything for her sake – except not seeing her.

Uncle Pullet, after silent meditation for a period of several lozenges, came distinctly to the conclusion, that when a young man was likely to do well, it was better not to meddle with him.

‘I think my head’s all alive inside like an old cheese, for I’m so full o’ plans, one knocks another over.

‘Perhaps I do,’ said Philip, rather sadly, ‘but I think of too many things – sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I’m cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music – I care for classic literature, and mediæval literature and modern literature – I flutter all ways, and fly in none.’

‘But surely that is a happiness to have so many tastes – to enjoy so many beautiful things – when they are within your reach,’ said Maggie, musingly. ‘It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent – almost like a carrier-pigeon.’

‘Yes, Maggie,’ said Philip, vehemently, ‘and you are shutting yourself up in a narrow self-delusive fanaticism which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dulness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed – that you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance – to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you. I am not resigned: I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned: you are only trying to stupefy yourself.’

no one has strength given to do what is unnatural. It is mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way.

Perhaps there is inevitably something morbid in a human being who is in any way unfavourably excepted from ordinary conditions until the good force has had time to triumph,

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best argued probabilities against them;

I have a different way of showing my affection.’ ‘Because you are a man, Tom, and have power, and can do something in the world.’