George Gissing Quotes

"I suppose," said Piers, "the English are the least Christian of all so-called Christian peoples.”
"Undoubtedly. They simply don't know the meaning of the prime Christian virtue — humility.

Nothing great would come of his endeavours, but what he aimed at he steadily perfected.

Everything he undertook was easy to him, and by a pleasant self-deception he made the passing of a school task his augury of success in greater things.

If one were as rich as those people! They pass so close to us; they see us, and we see them; but the distance between is infinity. They don’t belong to the same world as we poor wretches. They see everything in a different light; they have powers which would seem supernatural if we were suddenly endowed with them.

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.

Just before them, on the ice, a little troop of ducks was going by, fowl dispossessed of their wonted swimming-ground by the all-hardening frost. Of every two steps the waddlers took, one was a hopeless slip, and the spectacle presented by the unhappy birds in their effort to get along at a good round pace was ludicrous beyond resistance. They sprawled and fell, they staggered up again with indignant wagging of head and tail, they rushed forward only to slip more desperately; now one leg failed them, now the other, now both at once. And all the time they kept up a cackle of annoyance; they looked about them with foolish eyes of amazement and indignation; they wondered, doubtless, what the world was coming to, when an honest duck’s piece of water was suddenly stolen from him, and he was subjected to insult on the top of injury.

Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice, was a characterising note of Mr Fadge’s periodical; his

In passion, I can fling out violent words, but they don’t yet answer to my actual feeling. It will be long enough yet before I think contemptuously of you. You know that when a light is suddenly extinguished, the image of it still shows before your eyes. But at last comes the darkness.

CHAPTER I Table of Contents
NORTHERNERS IN SUNLIGHT Table of Contents
By a window looking from Posillipo upon the Bay of Naples sat an English lady, engaged in letter-writing. She was only in her four-and-twentieth year,

A man who comes to be hanged,' pursued Jasper, impartially, 'has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.' 'In