Eliot's Middlemarch

"Many have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness."

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time."

"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.
'No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semi-colons and parentheses.'"

"Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him."

"Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."

"And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her and to whom she is grateful."

"Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."

"For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor is generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptible as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly."

"There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them."

"'I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.'"

"All these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology."

"In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole."

"But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired."

"'By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with the darkness narrower.'
'That is a beautiful mysticism--it is a--'
'Please not to call it by any name,' said Dorothea. 'It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it.'

"They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds."

"Foolish sayings were more objectionable to her than any unwise doings."

"Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self."

"She had once said that she would like him to stay, and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her."

"He looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises."

"'I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.'"

"He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held that the deptch of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness."

"But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's orbit and solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day."

"Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy."

"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."

"A man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repeated error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."

"It could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing."

"'I have never done you injustice. Please, remember me,' said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob.
'Why should you say that?' said Will, with irritation. 'As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else.'"

"'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall."
-Measure for Measure (cited)

"The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses."

"But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."

"And in the long valley of her life, which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers by the way."

"'Yes, dear, a great many things have happened,' said Dorothea, in her full tones.
'I wonder what,' said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning forward upon them.
'Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth.'"

"'Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.'"

"'I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting another who is tied to us. Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.'"

"'It is quite true that I might have been a wiser person,' said Dorothea, 'and that I might have done something better, if I had been better. But this is what I am going to do.'"