Lorna’s Reviews > The Mill on the Floss > Status Update

“. . . if we judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all treachery and cruelty—we should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth. If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.”

“She turned away and hurried home, feeling that in the hour since she had trodden this road before, a new era had begun for her. The tissue of vague dreams must now get narrower, and all the threads of thought and emotion be gradually absorbed in the woof of her actual daily life.”

“Every affection, every delight the poor child had had was like an aching nerve to her. There was no music for her any more—no piano, no harmonized voices, no delicious stringed instruments with their passionate cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration through her frame.”

“There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories, no super-added life in the life of others; although, we who look on think lightly of such premature despair, as if our vision of the future lightened the blind sufferer’s present.”

“It was a dark, chill, misty morning, likely to end in rain—one of those mornings when even happy people take refuge in their hopes.”

“They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow, and the would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.”

“Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.”

“But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, ‘I’d do just the same again.’ That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.”