Eliot Waugh Quotes

Dear Q,

Hell of a thing getting you out of that dungeon. Richard showed up, finally, for which I suppose we should be grateful, though G-d knows he doesn't make it easy.

We wanted to stay, Q, but it was hard, and getting harder every day. The centaurs said it wasn't working. But if you're reading this then you woke up after all. I'm sorry about everything. I know you are too. I know I said I didn't need a family to become who I was supposed to be, but it turned out that I did. And it was you.

We'll meet again.

-E ~ Lev Grossman

Becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life. ~ Lev Grossman

Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing. ~ George Eliot

LAVINIA: Oh Edward!
The point is, that since I've been away
I see that I've taken you much too seriously.
And now I can see how absurd you are.
EDWARD: That is a very serious conclusion to have arrived at in ... how many? ... thirty-two hours. ~ T. S. Eliot

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. ~ T. S. Eliot

I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed. ~ Evelyn Waugh

We had the experience, but we missed the meaning. ~ T. S. Eliot

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love. ~ George Eliot

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression. ~ Evelyn Waugh

April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

To become what you are not, behave as you do not. ~ T. S. Eliot

But is it what we love, or how we love,
That makes true good? ~ George Eliot

Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos. ~ George Eliot

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens. ~ Michel Faber

That plain, middle-aged face, with a grave penetrating kindness in it, seeming to tell of a human being who had reached a firm, safe strand, but was looking with helpful pity towards the strugglers still tossed by the waves, had an effect on Maggie at this moment which was afterwards remembered by her as if it had been a promise. ~ George Eliot

That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion - a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only. ~ George Eliot

Soon someone would say the fatal words, Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself. ~ George Eliot

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen ... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself. ~ T. S. Eliot

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. ~ David Nicholls

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them. ~ George Eliot

What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I'm going to marry? The most unpleasant thing in the world. I should quarrel with him; I should be jealous of him; our menage would be conducted in a very ill-bred manner. A little quiet contempt contributes greatly to the elegance of life. ("The Lifted Veil") ~ George Eliot

Speech is but broken light upon the depth of the unspoken. ~ George Eliot

Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, "the home epic"- the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia - not for a country left behind but for a childhood landscape lost. ~ Rebecca Mead

There is one class of persons to which one speaks with difficulty, and another to which one speaks in vain. The second, more numerous and obstinate than may at first appear, because it represents a state of mind into which we are all prone through natural sloth to relapse, consists of those people who cannot believe that things will ever be very different from what they are at the moment. From time to time, under the influence perhaps of some persuasive write or speaker, they may have an instant of disquiet or hope; but an invincible sluggishness of imagination makes them go on behaving as if nothing would ever change. Those to whom one speaks with difficulty, but not perhaps in vain, are the persons who believe that great changes must come, but are not sure either of what is inevitable, or of what is probable, or of what is desirable. ~ T.S. Eliot

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mi ~ George Eliot

After all the work and lies - and lotion - it took to get me into this parking lot, I'm not going home without more success to add to my list. ~ Anne Eliot

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them. ~ George Eliot

Learning to love any one is like an increase of property,
it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm. ~ George Eliot

Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Go forward with joyful confidence. ~ George Eliot

Would it have been worthwhile
If one settling a pillow by her head should say:
That is not what I meant at all
That is not it at all ~ T. S. Eliot