George Eliot - Tumblr Posts
Henleigh Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda. Marries Gwendolyn Harleth for the sole purpose of psychologically torturing her.
Best villains in literature
Okay, let’s hear everyone’s top villains in lit! First one to come to mind for me - Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca. Ugh. 😒 Second is Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre. Sorry - he is a villain!!
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, other would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart bear, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Middlemarch; George Eliot
‘Aye, aye,’ said Mr. Macey, who felt very well satisfied with this attack on youthful presumption; ‘you’re right there, Tookey: there’s allays two 'pinions; there’s the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there’s the 'pinion other folks have on him. There’d be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.’
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
At last Mr. Snell, the landlord, a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor, broke silence[.]
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
Rather, from the strange fact that the robber had left no traces, and had happened to know the nick of time, utterly incalculable by mortal agents, when Silas would go away from home without locking his door, the more probable conclusion seemed to be, that his disreputable intimacy in that quarter, if it ever existed, had been broken up, and that, in consequence, this ill turn had been done to Marner by somebody it was quite in vain to set the constable after. Why this preternatural felon should be obliged to wait till the door was left unlocked, was a question which did not present itself.
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
And then he tried to make the scene easier to himself by rehearsal: he made up his mind how he would pass from the admission of his weakness in letting Dunstan have the money to the fact that Dunstan had a hold on him which he had been unable to shake off, and how he would work up his father to expect something very bad before he told him the fact. The old Squire was an implacable man: he made resolutions in violent anger, and he was not to be moved from them after his anger had subsided—as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden into rock. Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard.
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
[M]oreover, that everybody had a right to their own opinions, grounds or no grounds[.]
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
‘Where’s Dunsey, then? What do you stand talking there for? Go and fetch Dunsey, as I tell you, and let him give account of what he wanted the money for, and what he’s done with it. He shall repent it. I’ll turn him out. I said I would, and I’ll do it. He shan’t brave me. Go and fetch him.’ ‘Dunsey isn’t come back, sir.’ 'What! did he break his own neck, then?’ said the Squire, with some disgust at the idea that, in that case, he could not fulfil his threat.
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
Yes, there was a sort of refuge which always comes with the prostration of thought under an overpowering passion: it was that expectation of impossibilities, that belief in contradictory images, which is still distinct from madness, because it is capable of being dissipated by the external fact.
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
The Squire’s life was quite as idle as his sons’, but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm.
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
The landlord’s analogical argument was not well received by the farrier—a man intensely opposed to compromise.
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
It was very painful, when you had made it quite clear to a young man that you were determined not to marry him, however much he might wish it, that he would still continue to pay you marked attentions; besides, why didn’t he always show the same attentions, if he meant them sincerely, instead of being so strange as Mr. Godfrey Cass was, sometimes behaving as if he didn’t want to speak to her, and taking no notice of her for weeks and weeks, and then, all on a sudden, almost making love again? Moreover, it was quite plain he had no real love for her, else he would not let people have that to say of him which they did say. Did he suppose that Miss Nancy Lammeter was to be won by any man, squire or no squire, who led a bad life? That was not what she had been used to see in her own father, who was the soberest and best man in that country-side, only a little hot and hasty now and then, if things were not done to the minute.
Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)
Thought I had an original thought for once in my life, but apparently some random journalist said the same thing in a newspaper over a century ago
Ninguém pode ser sábio de estômago vazio.
George Eliot