Middlemarch (Grapevine Press)

by George Eliot

“You are very good, sir,” said Fred, with a fine sense of contrast between the words and his feeling.

“I am not aware of it. 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.

I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.”

“Oh, I have an easy life—by comparison. I have tried being a teacher, and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way.

think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it. Everything here I can do as well as any one else could; perhaps better than some—Rosy,

When a conversation has taken a wrong turn for us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.

“I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known—ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.”

as he had grown from boy to man, he had grown in love with his old playmate,

“I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.” “I think the goodness should come before he expects that.”

“You know better, Mary. Women don’t love men for their goodness.” “Perhaps not. But if they love them, they never think them bad.”

“I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say that you love me—if you will not promise to marry me—I mean, when I am able to marry.”

“If I did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly not promise ever to marry you.”

“That is not the question—what I want you to do. You have a conscience of your own, I suppose.

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago,

it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.

could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable.

He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.

for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples,

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity

He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty, without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life interesting

Lydgate was in love with this actress, as a man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to speak to.

was received with the usual quietude which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water,

it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification for any salaried office.

“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousand things—as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them. Happily, there is a common language between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.”

The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot,

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.

bringing a much more testing vision of details and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,

seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted strength—Lydgate

Rosamond had registered every look and word, and estimated them

as the opening incidents of a preconceived romance—incidents which gather value from the foreseen development and climax.

the rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in country towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals.

of a faded but genuine respectability:

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. One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

he always undervalues himself. I tell him he is undervaluing the God who made him,

I should rush into idleness, and stagnate there with all my might.”

I have no hobby besides. I have the sea to swim in there.”

You don’t mind my fumigating you?”

“Don’t you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody’s nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?”

“The shortest way is to make your value felt, so that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not.”

In the country, people have less pretension to knowledge, and are less of companions,

“I don’t translate my own convenience into other people’s duties.

he was a likable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to our friends.

One would know much better what to do if men’s characters were more consistent, and especially if one’s friends were invariably fit for any function they desired to undertake!

he had weight, and might be expected to grapple with a disease and throw it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect it lurking and to circumvent it.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.

for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream.

Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the very force of her nature heightened its confusion.

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.