George Eliot (1819-1880)

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 wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England, where most of her works are set. Her novels are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place, and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

Quotes

It's never too late to be who you might have been.
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
Childhood has no forebodings, but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
But pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
Some people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Neighbors
Our deeds are like children that are born to us;they live and act apart from our own will.
What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
One of the tortures of jealousy is that it can never turn its eyes away from the thing that pains it.
We ust find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

Music
What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
No evil dooms us hopelessly, except the evil we love, and desire to continue in and make no effort to escape from.
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined... to strengthen each other... to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.