Middlemarch (Grapevine Press)

by George Eliot

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.

But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space.

the Vicar’s elder sister, well-looking like himself, but nipped and subdued as single women are apt to be who spend their lives in uninterrupted subjection to their elders.

“Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing.

It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.