“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from. ”
“For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.”
“Those who trust us educate us.”
“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”
“I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.”
“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”
“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”
“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”
“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”
“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.”
“People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.”
“It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you.”
“No retrospect will take us to the true beginning”
“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a
beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start
with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'
unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time
is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been
understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears
that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,
too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into
billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off
in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true
beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is
but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story
sets out.”
“I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.'
'The time will come, dear, the time will come.”
“Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.”
“In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.”
“She was one of those women who are never handsome till they are old, and she had had the wisdom to embrace the beauty of age as early as possible.”
“No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.”
“We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp bakcward stroke of repetance.”
“We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers – and men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and pleadings made in vain.”
“I will wait till after Christmas.” What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worthwhile to set about anything we are disinclined to.”
“Attempts at description are stupid. Who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances.”
“It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly Considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be,” and the many-coloured creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.”
“Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.”
“Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blinding credulous rage at the reversal of their lot and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.”
“I had a terror of the world. None knew me; all would mistake me. I had seen so many in my life who made themselves glad with scorning, and laughed at another's shame. What could I do? This life seemed to be closing in upon me with a wall of fire—everywhere there was scorching that made me shrink. The high sunlight made me shrink. And I began to think that my despair was the voice of God telling me to die.”
“Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action--like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.”
“Hans: [Y]ou can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed of immortality has sprouted within me.
Deronda: Only a fungoid growth, I daresay - a crowing disease in the lungs.”
“I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.”
“If I fall and break my neck, will you say something nice at my funeral?"
"Like 'Kyler was usually more graceful?”
“Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.
“Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmurs, “that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?”
Joe swallows. “Yes, we can,” he says carefully.
“There will therefore be no more ‘Say hello, Polly’?”
“There will not.”
“Do all the work you can do, every day, and do each piece of work in a perfectly successful manner; put the power of success, and the purpose to get rich, into everything that you do.”
“Silences seem longer in darkness. I think it's because it's harder to lie when the lights are off. There's a rawness that only belongs to the night and the truth can't help but be set free.”
“And father said "I never wanted this. I'm sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw -- all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let's talk self-sufficiency!”
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