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Elizabeth Gaskell -
North and South (1854)
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It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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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.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Margaret liked this smile; it was the first thing she had admired in this new friend of her father's; and the opposition of character, shown in all these details of appearance she had just been noticing, seemed to explain the attraction they evidently felt towards each other.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Oh! that look of love!" continued he, between his teeth, as he bolted himself into his own private room. "And that cursed lie; which showed some terrible shame in the background, to be kept from the light in which I thought she lived perpetually! Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Mother, how you have tortured me! Oh! Margaret, could you not have loved me? I am but uncouth and hard, but I would never have led you into any falsehood for me.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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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.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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He loved her, and would love her; and defy her, and this miserable bodily pain.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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I take it that 'gentleman' is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as 'a man,' we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow-men, but in relation to himself,—to life—to time—to eternity.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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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.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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'Dear! Everybody is ill now, I think,' said Mrs. Hale, with a little of the jealousy which one invalid is apt to feel of another.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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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.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept their own miserable identity.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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If they came sorrowing, and wanting sympathy in a complicated trouble like the present, then they would be felt as a shadow in all these houses of intimate acquaintances, not friends
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Come! Poor little heart! Be cheery and brave. We'll be a great deal to one another, if we are thrown off and left desolate.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive." (Mr. Bell)
Elizabeth Gaskell
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He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so hard to compensate himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked upon her with an admiration he could not repress, she looked at him with proud indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he told himself - was a great fellow, with not a grace or a refinement about him.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Still to have loved her without return would have lifted you higher than all those, be they who they may, that have ever known her to love.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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She freshens me up above a bit. Who'd ha thought that face - as bright and as strong as the angel I dream of - could have known the sorrow she speaks on? I wonder how she'll sin. All on us must sing.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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When prayers were ended, and his Mother had wished him good-night with that long steady look of hers which conveyed no expression of the tenderness that was in her heart, but yet had all the intensity of a blessing.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Take care. -If you do not speak- I shall claim you as my own in some presumptuous way. -Send me away at once, if I must go; -Margaret!-
Elizabeth Gaskell
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What could he mean by speaking so, as if I were always thinking that he cared for me, when I know he does not; he cannot.... But I won't care for him. I surely am mistress enough of myself to control this wild, strange, miserable feeling
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Every mile was redolent of associations, which she would not have missed for the world, but each of which made her cry upon 'the days that are no more' with ineffable longing.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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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.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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I have passed out of childhood into old age. I have had no youth - no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me - for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same fearful spirit.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Quote of the day
In a word I was a pioneer, and therefore had to blaze my own trail.
Marshall Taylor
Elizabeth Gaskell
Creative Commons
Born:
September 29, 1810
Died:
November 12, 1865
(aged 55)
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