Middlemarch Quotes

“Somebody put a drop [of Mr. Casaubon’s blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses.”

“Not only young virgins of that town, but grey-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for their instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.”

“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. 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.”

“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilette, and never see the great soul in a man’s face.”

“I mean, marriage drinks up all of our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays with us like a murder—and everything else is gone.”

“Marriage, like religion and erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward requirement.”

“She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women are.”

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

“We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.”

“There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued a blank absence of interest or sympathy.”

“It was wicked to let a young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her.”

“What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to each other?”

“A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”

“This young creature has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary.”

“She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.”

“For my part I am very sorry for him.”

“One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.”

“No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts – what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials.”

“She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.”

“Language is a finer medium.”