George Gissing Quotes

exchanged looks, and laughed together.

Life utterly denied to me the satisfaction of my strongest instincts, so long as I plodded on without cause of shame; the moment I denied my faith, and put on a visage of brass, great possibilities opened before me

CHAPTER I THE FOLD AND THE SHEPHERD 'So to-morrow, Alice,' said Dr. Madden, as he walked with his eldest daughter on the coast-downs by Clevedon, 'I shall take steps for insuring my life for a thousand pounds.

"We are told," said Irene, "that England must expand."
"Probably. But the mere necessity of the case must not become our law. It won't do for a great people to say, 'Make room for us, and we promise to set you a fine example of civilisation; refuse to make room, and we'll blow your brains out!' One doubts the quality of the civilisation promised."

The sum of their faults was their inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability does not call for unmingled disdain.

Some great and noble sorrow may have the effect of drawing hearts together, but to struggle against destitution, to be crushed by care about shillings and sixpences — that must always degrade.

To flatter the proletariat is to fight against all the good that still characterises educated England — against reverence for the beautiful, against magnanimity, against enthusiasm of mind, heart, and soul.

Walker's a fool and Quarmby's an ass,' remarked her father.

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.

Why, who are the real social reformers? The men who don’t care a scrap for the people, but take up ideas because they can make capital out of them. It isn’t idealists who do the work of the world, but the hard-headed, practical, selfish men. A big employer of labour ‘ll do more good in a day, just because he sees profit’ll come of it, than all the mooning philanthropists in a hundred years.

One doesn’t like to do brutal things if one can avoid them, you know.

He pronounced his Latin in the new-old way, with Continental vowels. The effect of this on an Englishman's lips is always more or less pedantic, and in his case it was intolerable.

Dora kept her eyes down, and smiled ambiguously.

Poverty doesn’t allow of honourable feeling, any more than of compassion.

The truth was that nature had endowed them with a larger share of brains than was common in their circle, and had added that touch of pride which harmonised so ill with the restrictions of poverty. Their life had a tone of melancholy, the painful reserve which characterises a certain clearly-defined class in the present day.