They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.

For my part I am very sorry for him.

I cannot bear notions.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her.

Mr. Vincy himself had expensive Middlemarch habits—spent money on coursing, on his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting everything one wants without any question of payment.

It was a maxim about Middlemarch, and regarded as self-evident, that good meat should have good drink.

Mary turned the back of her father's hand to her lips and smiled at him.

Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things.

Especially if there was anything discreditable to be found out concerning another man, Caleb preferred not to know it; and if he had to tell anybody under him that his evil doings were discovered, he was more embarrassed than the culprit.

As if I wanted a husband!

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.

This was one of the difficulties of moving in good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification for any salaried office.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa,...