For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

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