Middlemarch (Grapevine Press)

by George Eliot

“Very good. I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting—not persecuting, you know.”

there’s no excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on your humming and hawing.

You ladies are always against an independent attitude—a man’s caring for nothing but truth, and that sort of thing. And there is no part of the county where opinion is narrower than it is here—I don’t mean to throw stones, you know, but somebody is wanted to take the independent line; and if I don’t take it, who will?”

where is a country gentleman to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbors?

don’t think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul.”

“I have a great shock for you; I hope you are not so far gone in love as you pretended to be.”

He is vulnerable to reason there—always a few grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness. Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on. And there must be a little crack in the Brooke family, else we should not see what we are to see.”

“Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!”

“What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?” said Sir James. “He has one foot in the grave.” “He means to draw it out again, I suppose.”

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads

of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

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.

irradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals of studious labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, his culminating age, the solace of

female tendance for his declining years. Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was.

She would not have asked Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things to be tiresome instead of helpful;

Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people’s pretensions much more readily. To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

there is a lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go—music, the fine arts, that kind of thing—they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know. A woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune.

his mortification lost some of its bitterness by being mingled with compassion.

“Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves. Elinor used to tell her sisters that she married me for my ugliness—it was so various and amusing that it had quite conquered her prudence.”

“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James. “No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

She was perfectly 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.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home.

there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.

finding that her home would be in a parish which had a larger share of the world’s misery, so that she might have had more active duties in it.

The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned.

Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a

man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause.

another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight,—which

she was looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both.

“How can I have a husband who is so much above me without knowing that he needs me less than I need him?”

much too well-born not to be an amateur in medicine.

Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him impressiveness as a listener.

“I don’t make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions.”

we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

“She is interesting to herself, I suppose; and I am not at all sure that everything gets easier as one gets older.”

“Mary, you are always so violent.” “And you are always so exasperating.” “I? What can you blame me for?” “Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating. There is the bell—I think we must go down.” “I did not mean to quarrel,” said Rosamond, putting on her hat. “Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”

She bowed and looked at him: he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.

Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain.

carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven, rank; a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly, and brought a vivid interest into her life which was better than any fancied “might-be” such as she was in the habit of opposing to the actual.

certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen

whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

“How do you know what men would fall in love with? Girls never know.”

eager inward life with little enjoyment of tangible things.

One can begin

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

“I hope I shall have nothing to do with clerical disputes,” said Lydgate. “The path I have chosen is to work well in my own profession.”

Here the old man’s eyes gleamed with a curiously mingled satisfaction in the consciousness that this smart young

fellow relied upon him, and that the smart young fellow was rather a fool for doing so.