Quote

It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.

Elizabeth Gaskell

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Elizabeth Gaskell
Age: 54 †
Born: 1810
Born: September 29
Died: 1865
Died: January 12
Biographer
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Author of Mary Barton
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson
Mrs. Gaskell
née Stevenson
Time
Poverty
Sordid
Life
Either
Anticipation
Future
Royal
Fact
Compared
Hope
Round
Fear
Rounds
Clipped
Facts
Luxury
Stings
Without
Atmosphere
Crept

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If they came sorrowing, and wanting sympathy in a complicated trouble like the present, then they would be felt as a shadow in all these houses of intimate acquaintances, not friends
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A great matter calls her son with terms like deal, and love.
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How different men were to women!
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Blot your misdeeds out (if you are particularly conscientious), by a good deed, as soon as you can just as we did a correct sum at school on the slate, where an incorrect one was only half rubbed out. It was better than wetting our sponge with our tears both less loss of time where tears had to be waited for, and a better effect at last.
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Look back. Look back at me. Richard Armitage spoke this line in the movie North and South as he watched Miss Hale drive away in a carriage.
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It is bad to believe you in error. It would be infinitely worse to have known you a hypocrite.
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Your husband this morning! Mine tonight! What do you take him for?' 'A man' smiled Cynthia. 'And therefore, if you won't let me call him changeable, I'll coin a word and call him consolable.
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Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.
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But the monotonous life led by invalids often makes them like children, inasmuch as thy have neither of them any sense of proportion in events, and seem each to believe that the walls and curtains which shut in their world, and shut out everything else, must of necessity be larger than anything hidden beyond.
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I know you despise me allow me to say, it is because you don't understand me.
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To be sure a stepmother to a girl is a different thing to a second wife to a man!
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And so she shuddered away from the threat of his enduring love. What did he mean? Had she not the power to daunt him? She would see. It was more daring than became a man to threaten her.
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Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning.
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What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong.
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Oh, Mr. Thornton, I am not good enough!' 'Not good enough! Don't mock my own deep feeling of unworthiness.
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Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
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Wearily she went to bed, wearily she arose in four or five hours' time. But with the morning came hope, and a brighter view of things.
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Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling but doing never did in all my life....My precept is, do something, my sister, do good if you can but at any rate, do something.
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He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him, seemed to thrill him through and through,—to melt away every resolution, all power of self-control, as if it were wax before a fire.
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He is my first olive: let me make a face while I swallow it.
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