Quote

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

George Eliot

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George Eliot
Age: 61 †
Born: 1819
Born: November 22
Died: 1880
Died: December 22
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
Mary Anne Evans
Mary Ann Evans
Marian Evans
Mary Anne Evans Cross
Mary Anne Cross
Life
Days
Occupation
Joyless
Future
Longing
Yearned
Desire
Intense
Importunate
Found
Likely
Distasteful
Past
Image
Slipped
Thought
Worse
Contented
Back
Harder
Varied
Years
Becoming
Renunciation
Despaired

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How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
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That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.
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An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
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One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.
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Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.
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O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!
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Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.
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The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.
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I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.
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... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.
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It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.
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We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
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We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.
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But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.
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Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism [sic] and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.
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Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
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It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
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Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.
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That sort of reputation which precedes performance [is] often the larger part of a man's fame.
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You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.
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