Date: 1860

"Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for themselves under unfavourable circumstances have been supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold on very unreceptive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scattered over Mr Tulliver had apparently been de...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Then -- the pity of it that a mind like hers should be withering in its very youth, like a young forest tree, for want of the light and space it was formed to flourish in!"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"For Tom had never desired success in this field of enterprise: and for getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"To have no cloud between herself and Tom was still a perpetual yearning in her, that had its root deeper than all change."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: April 1861

"My heart is like an apple-tree / Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit."

— Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"A man's mind---what there is of it---has always the advantage of being masculine,---as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,---and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"If it had really occurred to Mr Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him were already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day the reasons had budded and bloomed."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1935

"Not I, to whom the scraggly, unpruned emotions of many modern poets seem almost indecenly luxurious."

— North, Jessica Nelson (1891-1988)

Date: 1956

"'Can there be such stubbornness-- / A soul grown feverish, clutching its dead body-tree / Like a last storm-crossed leaf? "

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1962

"By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk."

— Spark, Muriel (1918-2006)