Middlemarch (Grapevine Press)

by George Eliot

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.”

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.”

“I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”

“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.” “I think it describes the smell of grilled bone.”

“I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike,” said Lydgate. “But I have noticed that one always believes one’s own town to be more stupid than any other.

We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!

I am seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it. That always makes one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.”

Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.

“There are other things to be more sorry for than that. But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world. I see enough of that every day.”

people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool’s caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.

It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them.

But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

“He’s good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their mind as they are making it up now, they don’t want a man—they only want a vote.”

As to gossip, you know, sending him away won’t hinder gossip. People say what they like to say, not what they have chapter and verse for,”

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

“I mean that he ought not to put such questions until he has done something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it.”

How can she choose if she has no variety to choose from? A woman’s choice usually means taking the only man she can get.

It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other’s presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning.

He really believed in the spiritual advantages, and meant that his life henceforth should be the more devoted because of those later sins which he represented to himself as hypothetic, praying hypothetically for their pardon:—“if I have herein transgressed.”

I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,”

“character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

But there is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity.

“Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

Lol

“He was ten times worthier of you than I was,” Fred could now say to her, magnanimously. “To be sure he was,” Mary answered; “and for that reason he could do better without me. But you—I shudder to think what you would have been—a curate in debt for horse-hire and cambric pocket-handkerchiefs!”

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.