George Gissing Quotes

His grey eyes searched her countenance with that horrible intensity of fanaticism which is so like the look of cruelty, of greed, of any passion originating in the baser self.

The earning of money should be a means to an end; for more than thirty years — I began to support myself at sixteen — I had to regard it as the end itself.

In this humor [bantering/flirtatious] she [Rhoda Nunn] seemed more than ever a challenge to his manhood. She was armed at all points. She feared nothing that he might say. No flush of apprehension; no nervous tremor; no weak self-consciousness. Yet he saw her as a woman, and desirable.

The thought of Clara became a preoccupation, and with the love which at length he recongised there blended a sense of fate fulfilling itself. His enthusiasms, his purposes, never defined as education would have defined them, were dissipated into utter vagueness. He lost his guiding interests, and found himself returning to those of boyhood. The country once more attracted him; he took out of his old sketch-books, bought a new one, revived the regret that he could not be a painter of landscape. A visit to one or two picture-galleries, and then again profound discouragement, recognition of the fact that he was a mechanic and never could be anything else.
It was the end of his illusions. For him not even passionate love was to preserve the power od idealising its object. He loved Clara with all the desire of his being, but could no longer deceive himself in judging her character. The same sad clearness of vision affected his judgement of the world about him, of the activities in which he had once been zealous, of the conditions which enveloped his life and the lives of those dear to him. The spirit of revolt often enough stirred within him, but no longer found utterance in the speech which brings no relief; he did his best to dispel the mood, mocking at it as folly. Consciously he set himself that task of becoming a practical man, of learning to make the best of life as he found it, of shunning as the fatal error that habit of mind which kept John Hewett on the rack. Who was he that he should look for pleasant things in his course through the world? ‘We are the lower orders; we are the working classes,’ he said bitterly to his friend, and that seemed the final answer to all his aspirations.

It was always in your power to rule me. What pained me worst, and hardened me against you, was that I saw you didn’t care to exert your influence. There was never a time when I could have resisted a word of yours spoken out of your love for me. But even then, I am afraid, you no longer loved me, and now — —

"I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society".
"If society were really decent, he would have been"

You have still to learn,’ said Jasper, ‘that modesty helps a man in no department of modern life. People take you at your own valuation. It’s the men who declare boldly that they need no help to whom practical help comes from all sides.

The result will be something unutterably tedious.

Of the country poor, at a somewhat

La vita è come la prendi: tutta malinconica, o moderatamente luminosa.

The unhoped was all but granted her. She could labour on in the valley of the shadow of books, for a ray of dazzling sunshine might at any moment strike into its musty gloom.

But we have no money. Suffer as we may, there's no help for it — because we have no money. Lives may be wasted — worse, far worse than wasted — just because there is no money. At this moment a whole world of men and women is in pain and sorrow — because they have no money. How often have we said that? The world is made so; everything has to be bought with money.

Mr Biffen,’ wrote another, ‘seems not to understand that a work of art must before everything else afford amusement.

I seem anything but lovable. I don't underrate my powers — rather the opposite, no doubt; but what I always seem to lack is the gift of pleasing — moral grace. My strongest emotions seem to be absorbed in revolt; for once that I feel tenderly, I have a hundred fierce, resentful, tempestuous moods. To be suave and smiling in common intercourse costs me an effort.

We all know perfectly well that happiness is the conscious exertion of individual powers