The Mill on the Floss (Modern Library Classics)

by George Eliot

“O Tom, please forgive me—I can’t bear it—I will always be good—always remember things—do love me—please, dear Tom!”

Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married

life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired.

after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years, would go at it again to-day with undulled alacrity.

it seemed impossible that past events should be so obstinate as to remain unmodified when they were complained against.

Seeing this, Maggie lingered at a distance, looking like a small Medusa with her snakes cropped.

For poor little Maggie had at once the timidity of an active imagination and the daring that comes from overmastering impulse.

It is precisely the proudest and most obstinate men who are the most liable to shift their position and contradict themselves in this sudden manner: everything is easier to them than to face the simple fact that they have been thoroughly defeated,

The pride and obstinacy of millers, and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden

sort, that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record—such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, under a lot made suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a home where the morning brings no promise with it,

Poor Mrs. Tulliver, it seemed, would never recover her old self—her placid household activity: how could she?

his quietness made her all the more sure she had given him great pain, and she wanted to show him how unwillingly she had given it. They walked together hand in hand in silence.

“Because you are a man, Tom, and have power, and can do something in the world.” “Then, if you can do nothing, submit to those that can.”

“An alarming amount of devil there,” was Stephen’s first thought. The second, when she had bent over her work, was, “I wish she would look at me again.”

ladies are not the worst disposed towards a new acquaintance of their own sex because she has points of inferiority.

“Character,” says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—“character is destiny.”

But the new images summoned by Philip’s name, dispersed half the oppressive spell she had been under.

“Good-bye,” said Stephen, in a tone that had the same beseeching discontent as his eyes.

Was it possible to quarrel with a creature who had such eyes—defying and deprecating, contradicting and clinging, imperious and beseeching—full of delicious opposites. To see such a creature subdued by love for one would be a lot worth having—to another man.

I mean your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who has too much sense and goodness to share their narrow prejudices. She has never entered into the family quarrels.”

“What does that signify? We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to.

Love this line. It gets to the heart of the sexism/patriarchy of George Eliot's world.

The culmination of Maggie’s career as an admired member of society in St. Ogg’s was certainly the day of the bazaar, when her simple, noble beauty,

We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanour is made up of artificial airs, until we see a person who is at once beautiful and simple: without the beauty, we are apt to call simplicity awkwardness.

Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes, and you will understand that contradiction in Stephen.

He had chosen the most effective appeal; but Maggie’s will was fixed unswervingly on the coming wrench. She had made up her mind to suffer.

public opinion, which at St. Ogg’s, as elsewhere, always knew what to think, would have judged in strict consistency with those results.

the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.

She sat without candle in the twilight, with the window wide open towards the river; the sense of oppressive heat adding itself undistinguishably to the burthen of her lot.

Seated on a chair against the window, with her arm on the window-sill, she was looking blankly at the flowing river, swift with the backward-rushing tide—struggling to see still the sweet face in its unreproaching sadness, that seemed now from moment to moment to sink away and be hidden behind a form that thrust itself between, and made darkness.

Nature repairs her ravages—repairs them with her sunshine, and with human labour.

And every man and woman mentioned in this history was still living—except those whose end we know.

Nature repairs her ravages—but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred: if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.