“If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.”

“You know I have duties──we both have duties──before which feeling must be sacrificed.”

“Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse...”

“Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.”

“It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.”

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; theyknow all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.”