We prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character.

She found to her surprise that an old friend is not always the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of.

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

It was an exquisite January morning in which there was no threat of rain, but a gray sky making the calmest background for the charms of a mild winter scene—the grassy borders of the lanes, the hedgerows sprinkled with red berries and haunted with low twitterings.

And thus to swell a gnat into an elephant.

When I awake at cock-crow, I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false.

There was the newly elected mayor of Middlemarch.

Good resolutions and bright hopes for the New Year! Amen. People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be pious or affectionate.

Life is a various mother.

31 December 1870: Here is the last day of 1870. I have written only 100 pages—good printed pages—of a story which I began about the opening of November, and at present mean to call "Miss Brooke." Poetry halts just now. In my private lot I am unspeakably happy, loving, and beloved.

Sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form.

I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them.

It was but the third morning after the first Christmas he had spent in his English home for fifteen years, and the home looked like an eminently desirable one.

We mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object.

There’s no blameless life Save for the passionless.

25 December 1858: How little we thought of people's goodness towards us when we were children. It takes a good deal of experience to tell one the rarity of a thoroughly disinterested kindness.

25 December 1858: Mr. Lewes is not quite so capable of appreciating oysters as I am, being a miserably moderate eater, unequal to the sublime excesses of a genius like me. In compensation, he will dissect a few.

25 December 1858: All prosperity of soul and body attend to you this and every other day in the calendar. That, dear friend, is the sincere wish of Yours affectionately Marian Lewes

Romola had had contact with no mind that could stir the larger possibilities of her nature; they lay folded and crushed like embryonic wings, making no element in her consciousness beyond an occasional vague uneasiness.

A disagreeable resolve formed in the chill hours of the morning had as many conditions against it as the early frost, and rarely persisted under the warming influences of the day.

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.

21 December, 1863. Dear Mr. Langford, If you happen to have within reach a copy of the original edition of "Silas Marner," I shall be very much obliged by your sending it to me. I want it for a friend who has been very good to me and who cares for large print. Always yours sincerely M. E. Lewes.

They were all blockheads.

If you get hold of a chap that’s got no shame nor conscience to stop him, you must try what you can do by bunging his eyes up.

These things are a parable.

Scrappy slovenliness.

Poor eager hope is but a stammerer, Must listen dumbly to great memory, Who makes our bliss the sweeter by her telling.

Read Emma in the evening.

He glided to the ottoman and . . .

In this artificial life of ours, it is not often we see a human face with all a heart’s agony in it, uncontrolled by self-consciousness; when we do see it, it startles us as if we had suddenly waked into the real world of which this everyday one is but a puppet-show copy.

A liveliness of the spine, with a more or less constant nullity of brain.

If I’m not as wise as the three kings, I know how many legs go into one boot.

Yes, indeed! Arthur felt there was not air enough in the room to satisfy his renovated life, when he had read that passage in the letter. He threw up the windows, he rushed out of doors into the December air.

An ingenious web of probabilities—the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

5 Dec. ‘59 I shall go on writing from my inward promptings — writing what I love and believe, what I feel to be true and good, if I can only render it worthily — and then leave all the rest to take its chance.

As if he left his head empty for the devil to dance in.

Give me a three-legged stool, and it will call up associations — moral, poetical, mathematical — if I do but ask it.

Has anyone ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

What! leave the opera with my part ill-sung While I was warbling in a drawing-room? Sing in the chimney-corner to inspire My husband reading news? Let the world hear My music only in his morning speech Less stammering than most honourable men's? No!

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?

Cold, is it, my darling? Bless your sweet face!

But I should like Tom to be a bit of a scholard, so as he might be up to the tricks o’ these fellows as talk fine and write with a flourish.

History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

Catherine having so high a standard as to have refused Lord Slogan.

She was clever with that sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous. Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.

Nettle-seed needs no digging.

My pork-pies don’t turn out well by chance.

The sight of you revives the taste of that super-excellent pork-pie.

Nobody loses by sending me a porkpie, for my pies are fit to show with the best o’ my neighbors’.

In opposition to most people who love to read Shakspeare I like to see his plays acted better than any others: his great tragedies thrill me, let them be acted how they may.