You come home to find your 17-year-old daughter engrossed…

“Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”

— George Eliot

But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the…

— Virginia Woolf

People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves…

— George Eliot

It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but…

— Anne Fadiman

You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.

— George Eliot

You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is,…

— George Eliot

What's your favorite book?' is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services--and favorite isn't, anyway, the right word…

— Rebecca Mead

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them…

— Vikram Seth

“When the commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die-- and soon," then death grapples us, and…

— George Eliot

If there is a perfect book to start the year with it has to be Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.

— The Edge

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

— George Eliot

“Le coeur se sature d'amour comme d'un sel divin qui le conserve; de la l'incorruptible adherence de ceux qui se sont aimes des l'aube…

— Victor Hugo

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

— George Eliot

“...but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle — solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of…

— George Eliot

And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if…

— George Eliot