The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.

I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.