Middlemarch

A treasury of wit from George Eliot's masterpiece. Curated by @heashaw

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

What can the fitness of things mean, if not their fitness to a man's expectations? Failing this, absurdity and atheism gape behind him.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

With his taper struck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

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 in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

She had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger or repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

The quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

Autumn and winter seemed to go hand in hand like a happy aged couple, one of whom would presently survive in chiller loneliness.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

She was not looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

He had not escaped the low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

The majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments, or the dullness of our own jokes.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

He had always known in a general way that he was not rich, but he had never felt poor, and he had no power of imagining the part which the want of money plays in determining the actions of men.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

He was a likeable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational flavours which make half of us an affliction to our friends.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

I feed a weakness or two, lest they should get clamorous.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

Mortals must share the fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always classical.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

She was clever with that sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous. Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

Since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still if they could only be got cheaply.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they are or woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

[Middlemarch @OrangeJelliot]

All choice of words is slang; it marks a class.