Favourite quotes from Middlemarch by George Eliot
“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
“One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.”
“The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.”
“He has got no good red blood in his body,“ said Sir James. “No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.”
“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life – the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within – can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscious qualms; she felt she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.”
“He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.”
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
The Long Victorian 
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