Middlemarch

by George Eliot

The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.

“Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”

that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights.

Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions,

The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent:

and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The

Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law!

You always see what nobody else sees; it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain. That’s your way, Dodo.”

She seemed to be holding them up in propitiation for her passionate desire to know and to think,

She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr. Casaubon.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly.

The masculine universal

As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory?

Knowledge granting authority

And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself. Miss

“What has that to do with Miss Brooke’s marrying him? She does not do it for my amusement.”

unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

interests me

Mr. Casaubon’s words had been quite reasonable, yet they had brought a vague instantaneous sense of aloofness on his part.

“How can one describe a man? I can give you an inventory:

One can begin so many things with a new person!—even begin to be a better man.

And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful.

unknown—known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors’ false suppositions.

and about 1829 the dark territories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited young adventurer.

The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived in the provinces.

Lydgate felt sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.

As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence—seems,

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and

Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her;

Perhaps she was conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had much that she might give to those who had nothing, and carried in her conscience the guilt of that repressed desire.

Hitherto in his own life his wants had been supplied without any trouble to himself, and his first impulse was always to be liberal with half-crowns as matters of no importance to a gentleman; it had never occurred to him to devise a plan for getting half-crowns.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

just as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.

Wow, look at you George Elliot!!

But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.

Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty:

Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.

said Will, feeling so happy that he affected indifference with delightful ease.

the power our minds have of riding several horses at once by

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque,

this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery.

She was able enough to estimate him—she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him.

Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper. It was mortifying.

He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

This afternoon the helplessness was more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed for objects who could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear. She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain, and now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labor producing what would never see the light.

have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest—I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much. But I should like to see Mr. Farebrother and hear him preach.”

But her soul thirsted to see him.

Still “I do wish it” came at the end of those wise reflections as naturally as a sob after holding the breath.

for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

It must be remembered that by “business” Caleb never meant money transactions, but the skilful application of labor.

When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives.