Mary > Mary's Quotes

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.”
― Edith Wharton

“Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“but a sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. it soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”
― Jane Austen

“A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Sometimes you are in just the right place.”
― Fred Rogers

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“Yet, in spite of all this, Anne had reason to believe that she [Mrs Smith] had moments only of languor and depression, to hours of occupation and enjoyment. How could it be? - She watched - observed - reflected - and finally determined that this was not a case of fortitude or of resignation only. - A submissive spirit might be patient, a strong understanding would supply resolution, but here was something more; here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from Nature alone. It was the choicest gift of Heaven; and Anne viewed her friend as one of those instances in which, by a merciful appointment, it seems designed to counterbalance almost every other want.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.”
― Clifton Fadiman, Any Number Can Play

“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“Colonel Brandon alone, of all the party, heard her without being in raptures. He paid her only the compliment of attention;”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
― Frederick Douglass, Writings and Speeches

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby