Elizabeth Gaskell

“No one loves me, - no one cares for me, but you, mother.”

“What do you expect—not indifference or ingratitude?’ (-Miss Benson) ‘It is better not to expect or calculate consequences. The longer I live, the more fully I see that. Let us try simply to do right actions, without thinking of the feelings they are to call out in others. We know that no holy or self-denying effort can fall to the ground vain and useless; but the sweep of eternity is large, and God along knows when the effect is to be produced. We are trying to do right now, and to feel right; don’t let us perplex ourselves with endeavoring to map out how she should feel, or how she should show her feelings.’ (-Thurstan)”

“Ask , and it shall be given until you. That is no vain or untried promise, Ruth!”

“Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn't me.”

“Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.”

“There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.”

“Nature felt no change, and was ever young.”

“Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.”

“He swallowed down the dry choking sobs which had been heaving up from his heart hitherto ...”

“On some such night as this she remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur et sans reproche; it had seemed to her then that she had only to will, and such a life would be accomplished. And now she had learnt that not only to will, but also to pray, was a necessary condition in the truly heroic. Trusting to herself, she had fallen.”

“My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.”

“He spoke as if the answer were a matter of indifference to him. But it was not so. For all his pain, he longed to see the author of it. Although he hated Margaret at times, when he thought of that gentle familiar attitude and all the attendant circumstances, he had a restless desire to renew her picture in his mind--a longing for the very atmosphere she breathed. He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.”

“My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.”

“A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.”

“…everything may be done in a right way or a wrong; the right way is to do it as well as we can, as in God’s sight; the wrong is to do it in a self-seeking spirit, which either leads us to neglect it to follow out some device of our own before and after the doing.”

“He shrank from hearing Margaret's very name mentioned; he, while he blamed her – while he was jealous of her – while he renounced her – he loved her sorely, in spite of himself.”

“He had tenderness in his heart — ‘a soft place,’ as Nicholas Higgins called it; but he had some pride in concealing it; he kept it very sacred and safe, and was jealous of every circumstance that tried to gain admission. But if he dreaded exposure of his tenderness, he was equally desirous that all men should recognize his justice; and he felt that he had been unjust, in giving so scornful a hearing to anyone who had waited, with humble patience, for five hours, to speak to him.”

“I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you do not understand me.”

“If Molly had not been so entirely loyal to her friend, she might havethought this constant brilliancy a little tiresome when brought intoevery-day life; it was not the sunshiny rest of a placid lake, it wasrather the glitter of the pieces of a broken mirror, which confusesand bewilders.”

“He came up straight to her father, whose hands he took and wrung without a word - holding them in his for a minute or two, during which time his face, his eyes, his look, told of more sympathy than could be put into words.”