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

"The peculiarities of his father and mother were very irksome to him now they were laid bare of all the softening accompaniments of an easy prosperous home, for Tom had very clear prosaic eyes not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire, Mr Tulliver retained the feeling towards his 'little wench' which made her presence a need to him though it would not suffice to cheer him. She was still the desire of his eyes, but the sweet spring of fatherly love was now mi...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"She rebelled against her lot, she fainted under its loneliness, and fits even of anger and hatred towards her father and mother who were so unlike what she would have them to be - towards Tom, who checked her and met her thought or feeling always by some thwarting difference - would flow out ove...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets - here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things - here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme teacher was waiting t...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, and the 'Christian Year' (no longer rejected as a 'hymn-book') that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of h...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"That new inward life of hers, notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions, yet shone out in her face with a tender soft light that mingled itself as added loveliness with the gradually enriched colour and outline of her blossoming youth"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"That is pain to me, and always will be pain, until my faculties lose their keenness, like aged eyes."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)