Month: January 2008

But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired

George Eliot, in Middlemarch

it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge

George Eliot, in Middlemarch (chapter 42)

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope

George Eliot, in Middlemarch (chapter 51 )

It never goes away

Last line of The Two Jakes (reviewed here)