I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?

Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

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

I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

What a comfort is friendship in this world.