Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.