When a man had married into a family where there was a whole litter of women, he might have plenty to put up with if he chose. But Mr. Tulliver did not choose.
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 delig...
What have you been doing lately?’ ‘I? Oh, minding the house–pouring out syrup–pretending to be amiable and contented–learning to have a bad opinion of everybody.
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, Oh, nothing! Pride...
We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own case link us indissolubly with the established order.
We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.—In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibili...
We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our little hurts will be made much of - to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other...
We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to c...
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
True, he had dreamy visions of possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions - does not find images rising in his mind whic...
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emoti...
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blinding credulous rage at the reversal of their lot and half believe that their wild crie...
They were very bitter tears: everybody in the world seemed so hard and unkind to Maggie: there was no indulgence, no fondness, such as she imagined when she fashioned the world afresh in her own thoug...
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people -- amongst whom yo...
There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence calmly ind...
There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger th...
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginnin...
There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us...
There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.