Erin Pritchard > Erin's Quotes

“Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers – and men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and pleadings made in vain.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose," said Isabel”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“She is written in a foreign tongue.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“She was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts, and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar...It may be affirmed without delay that She was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right; impulsively, she often admired herself...Every now and then she found out she was wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself. She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization, should move in the realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it--to make any sort of success in it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can't always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you're very ready to do; but there's another thing that's still more important--you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that--you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all--you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views--that's your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“He surveyed the edifice from the outside, and admired it greatly; he looked in at the windows, and received an impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses, and that he had not yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and although he had keys in his pocket he had a conviction that none of them would fit. She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature, but what was she going to do with herself?”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“- Do you know I love you ?
- I'm sure I don't care whether you do or not !”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“There is no generosity without sacrifice.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“She had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship - the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one's own personality.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady