George Eliot Quotes

English novelist, essayist, poet and journalist (1819–1880)

George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans; 22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880) was an English novelist and poet. Despite the strong social customs of her times against such arrangements, she lived unmarried with fellow writer George Henry Lewes‎‎ for over 20 years.

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Birth Name: Mary Anne Evans

Native Name: Mary Ann Evans • Marian Evans

Alternative Names: Mary Anne Evans Cross • Mary Anne Cross • Marian Cross

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She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes from the first moments of our first great sorrow when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and healed, to have despaired and recovered hope.

I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known— ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.