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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fe5eb3a | Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author. | George Eliot | ||
| af63679 | Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honour to coexist with hers. | George Eliot | ||
| 14ced82 | At all events, it is certain that if any medicinal man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill. | George Eliot | ||
| 644bad6 | You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. | George Eliot | ||
| 4612fcc | The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That's my text--which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims, not the virtuous upholder of the wrong. | George Eliot | ||
| 8aeea61 | Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy:--in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from the bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the.. | George Eliot | ||
| 0a9f843 | It is offensive to tell a lady when she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement. | George Eliot | ||
| fd5399a | Imagination is often truer than fact," said Gwendolen, decisively, though she could no more have explained these glib words than if they had been Coptic or Etruscan. "I shall be so glad to learn all about Tasso--and his madness especially. I suppose poets are always a little mad." "To be sure--'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling'; and somebody says of Marlowe-- 'For that fine madness still he did maintain, Which always should possess t.. | George Eliot | ||
| b54a00a | She felt that she was beginning to know the pang of disappointed love, and that no other man could be the occasion of such delightful aerial building as she had been enjoying for the last six months. | George Eliot | ||
| b9bad56 | Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight--that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin. | George Eliot | ||
| dc58944 | Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so. | George Eliot | ||
| ea653e1 | When a conversation has taken a wrong turn for us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness. | George Eliot | ||
| b87ee48 | Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories. | George Eliot | ||
| 057477b | I don't mean your resentment toward them," said Philip... "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. It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of marrying old Tulliver's daughter." | George Eliot | ||
| e060d49 | 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 | ||
| 8f91921 | Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. | George Eliot | ||
| 6f10d7b | It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love--this hunger of the heart--as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world. | George Eliot | ||
| 3ffa94a | it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. | George Eliot | ||
| 05ccce8 | On both occasions Fred had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater my.. | George Eliot | ||
| deeb8af | This awakening of a new interest--this passing from the supposition that we hold the right opinions on a subject we are careless about, to a sudden care for it, and a sense that our opinions were ignorance--is an effectual remedy for ennui, which, unhappily, cannot be secured on a physician's prescription; | George Eliot | ||
| c802bb1 | Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously. | George Eliot | ||
| 2fb1eb2 | It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think the emerald is more beautiful than any of them. | middlemarch romance-of-stones | George Eliot | |
| afae798 | If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again. | George Eliot | ||
| c49b0ba | Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspirations Lydgate regarded as rather v.. | George Eliot | ||
| 8f0c5bb | What's broke can never be whole again. | George Eliot | ||
| 739dd5b | Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn't want her hair to look pretty,-that was out of the question,-she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom bega.. | George Eliot | ||
| 5b58cc3 | I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of. | George Eliot | ||
| f336024 | Her imagination was not easily acted on, but she could not help thinking that her case was a hard one, since it appeared that other people thought it hard. | George Eliot | ||
| 2ba0eb1 | But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance. | George Eliot | ||
| e1f41c0 | These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed gra.. | George Eliot | ||
| aca843d | A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world. | George Eliot | ||
| 4ff3ef5 | Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish. | George Eliot | ||
| b27c51e | You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods. | poetry | George Eliot | |
| 81e917a | Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact. --George Eliot | Rebecca Z. Shafir | ||
| 31ededa | it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness--calling their denial knowledge. | George Eliot | ||
| f06fa7a | The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can't be helped. But for now Anders can still make time | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 116559c | Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is.. | loyalty writing | Tobias Wolff | |
| aee3c9f | Want! You must want something. What do you want? | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 57cf6d5 | an zndgy r khh b`th nwshtn myshwd nmytwn rwy khGdh awrd. an zndgy by ankhh khwd nwysndh bdnd bh pysh myrwd. frG z shtGlt fkhry w hyhw, dr gwdlhyy `myq w trykh khh khTrt shbHwr bhkhTr m dr anj nbrd mykhnnd, ykhdygr r z p drmyawrnd w dr pyn khh chndtshn bqy mymnnd dr pysh chshm m Zhr myshwnd, m b hmn brkhwrd by`tnyy mwjh myshwnd khh pyshkhdmth hngm awrdn fnjny qhwhy Dfh. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 232021b | But did it have to be that those who were most damaged by the genocide remained the most neglected in the aftermath? Bonaventure Nyibizi was especially worried about young survivors becoming extremists themselves. "Let's say we have a hundred thousand young people who lost their families and have no hope, no future. In a country like this if you tell them, 'Go and kill your neighbor because he killed your father and your seven brothers and .. | Philip Gourevitch | ||
| 64e4191 | Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building...In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously admistered states in history. | Philip Gourevitch | ||
| ebbeb0e | In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue 'ethnic' identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority... Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no.. | Philip Gourevitch | ||
| 5917f93 | I couldn't help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city--and, although we don't like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children. | human-origins murder | Philip Gourevitch | |
| fda5176 | Do not be like cows grazing watching | Alice Walker |