Quotes about George Eliot

7 Sourced Quotes

In later years the great novelist who was known as George Eliot had, in spite of her ugliness, a monolithic, mysterious, primeval grandeur of countenance, like that of an Easter Island statue, washed by oceans of light.

I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.

I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvellous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen? Well, there are a few fantasies that are. One of them is Paradise Lost.

I have, then, given my hostages. What I think and judge I have stated as responsibly and clearly as I can. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence: the great tradition of the English novel is there.

They're often bracketed together, Tolkien and Lewis, which I suppose is fair because they were great friends — both Oxford writers and scholars, both Christians. Tolkien's work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature — Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad — the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that's what Tolkien's up to, he's left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted.

On witnessing a man treat George Eliot in a rude manner:

I sat down in a corner and prayed to God to blast him. God did nothing, and ever since I have been an agnostic.

Augustine Birrell

Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.

William Butler Yeats