There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.

Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.

God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.