A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.

One can say everything best over a meal.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Middlemarch

Man cannot choose his duties.

I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.

It's no trifle at her time at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.