The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

There'll be oceans of talk and emotions without end.

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

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