Quotes About Middlemarch

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?

What's your favorite book?' is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services--and favorite isn't, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that 'Middlemarch' has in mine.

Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, "the home epic"- the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia - not for a country left behind but for a childhood landscape lost.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

But the vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this - that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him. [from Middlemarch, a quote my mother thinks describes the kind of man my father was]

At all events, it is certain that if any medicinal man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill.

The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man – what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles! 'Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be – is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic?

No one in Middle march was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate's past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did not come under their own senses.

Still, I repeat, there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch. And

The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never thought of Mr. Brooke as a neighbour and were not more attached to him than if he had been sent in a box from London.

Middlemarch] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.

The narrating voice that tells 'Middlemarch' is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.