George Eliot

I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

He was unique to her among men because he__ impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who__ nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.

Oh, you dear good father!" cried Mary, putting her hands round her father´s neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. "I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world.""Nonsense, child; you´ll think your husband better.""Impossible," said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone, "husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you__ think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.

She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man__ past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

What should I do__ow should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.