George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, the Radical, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 November 1819
two way used
there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is, to tell them what they're used to.
children thinking chance
A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.
men age singles
In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.
distance eye people
People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes ...
oddities sorrow faults
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.
mistake men genius
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.
common mist walks
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
selfish science obligation
Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.
reading mind done
I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
reading able hunger
There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.
art book writing
I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.
debt dinner principles
I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
way offensive habit
Unhappily the habit of being offensive 'without meaning it' leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.
past self sorrow
It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.