Popular quotes: The meaning an history behind "Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when..."
"Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love." - George Eliot.
This quote is sometimes incorrectly attributed to T.S. Eliot, but it
actually comes from Chapter 15 of
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871).
George Eliot was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans or Marian Evans (she
spelled her name both ways during her life) who was born in Warwickshire,
England in 1819. She was educated in private schools and by tutors, and took
charge of the family household when she was 17, following the death of her
mother. After her father died in 1849 she traveled in Europe before settling in
London where she began to write for the Westminster Review. She became the
center of a literary circle, which included the philosopher and literary critic
George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived until his death in 1878 (a scandalous
situation for the time as he remained married to his wife throughout, but set up
house with Eliot). She was first published in 1857, and her first novel,
Adam Bede, was published in
1859. She is best remembered for Adam Bede, The Mill on The Floss,
Silas Marner and Middlemarch. In 1880, she married an old
friend, John Cross, who was 20 years her junior. They honeymooned in
Venice. A few months later she died of a kidney ailment.
Henry James once said of her, "She has a low forehead,
a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a
chin and jawbone qui n'en finissent pas... Now in this vast ugliness
resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and
charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes
behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking."
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
Full Story
