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

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Excessive literary production is a social offense.
It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
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 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.
When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are.
It is never too late to become what we might have been.
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

Ignorance
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
Wear a smile and have friends,
wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Talking
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Success
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Clever Jabs
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

Life & Death
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
It's never too late to be what you might have been.