The Mill on the Floss quotes

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love, and that Tom and Lucy should do or see anything of which she was ignorant would have been an intolerable idea to Maggie.

But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn’s hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops.

“In their death they were not divided.”

— Spoken by a character · V. The Last Conflict

The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted; living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together.

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

— Spoken by a character · X. The Spell Seems Broken

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

— Spoken by a character · I. In the Red Deeps

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

— Philip · I. In the Red Deeps

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

— Maggie · IV. Another Love-Scene

Maggie, that is a proof of what I write now to assure you of,—that no anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

— Spoken by a character · III. Showing That Old Acquaintances Are Capable of Surprising Us

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt; it seemed to be a world where people behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love, and that did not belong to them.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

And if you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

When Maggie was not angry, she was as dependent on kind or cold words as a daisy on the sunshine or the cloud; the need of being loved would always subdue her, as, in old days, it subdued her in the worm-eaten attic.

It was one of their happy mornings. They trotted along and sat down together, with no thought that life would ever change much for them; they would only get bigger and not go to school, and it would always be like the holidays; they would always live together and be fond of each other.

“I think I am quite wicked with roses; I like to gather them and smell them till they have no scent left.”

— Spoken by a character · X. The Spell Seems Broken