George Eliot
The mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims.
- 6 February 1865: I suspect you have come to dislike letters, but until you say so, I must write now and then to gratify myself.
- From the first a cool deliberate design.
- “Yes, let us go,” said Harold, throwing down the newspaper.
- Loud at taverns and private banquets.
- But you may rely on it that no amount of horse-power would make me hurry over my book, so as not to do my best. If it is written fast, it will be because I can’t help writing it fast.
- To be delivered from all doubts as to one’s justification in writing at this stage of the world, one should have either a plentiful faith in one’s own exceptionalness or a plentiful lack of money.
- Music arches over this existence with another and a diviner. Amen too, to that ideen-voll observation of Hegel's, We hardly know what it is to feel for human misery until we have heard a shriek, and a more perfect hell might be made out of sounds than out of any preparation of fire and brimstone.