Elizabeth Gaskell Quotes
-
She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would fall down over her round wrist. Mr. Thornton watched the replacing of this troublesome ornament with far more attention than he listened to her father. It seemed as if it fascinated him to see her push it up impatiently, until it tightened her soft flesh; and then to mark the loosening—the fall. He could almost have exclaimed—'There it goes, again!
-
A man is so in the way in the house.
-
Mr. Thornton felt that in this influx no one was speaking to Margaret, and was restless under this apparent neglect. But he never went near her himself; he did not look at her. Only, he knew what she was doing — or not doing — better than anyone else in the room. Margaret was so unconscious of herself, and so much amused by watching other people, that she never thought whether she was left unnoticed or not.
-
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.
-
Margaret was not a ready lover, but where she loved she loved passionately, and with no small degree of jealousy.
-
There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.
-
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.
-
If Mr. Thornton was a fool in the morning, as he assured himself at least twenty times he was, he did not grow much wiser in that afternoon. All that he gained in return for his sixpenny omnibus ride, was a more vivid conviction that there never was, never could be, any one like Margaret; that she did not love him and never would; but that she — no! nor the whole world — should never hinder him from loving her.
-
I am the mother that bore you, and your sorrow is my agony; and if you don't hate her, i do' Then, mother, you make me love her more. She is unjustly treated by you, and I must make the balance even.
-
Oh, Mr. Thornton, I am not good enough!' 'Not good enough! Don't mock my own deep feeling of unworthiness.
-
Nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men. Dying is nothing to it.
-
All the earth, though it were full of kind hearts, is but a desolation and desert place to a mother when her only child is absent.
-
He shook hands with Margaret. He knew it was the first time their hands had met, though she was perfectly unconscious of the fact.
-
Mr. Thorton love Margaret! Why, Margraret would never think of him, I'm sure! Such a thing has never entered her head." "Entering her heart would do.
-
Even before he left the room, — and certainly, not five minutes after, the clear conviction dawned upon her, shined bright upon her, that he did love her; that he had loved her; that he would love her. And she shrank and shuddered as under the fascination of some great power.
-
Mr Thornton would rather have heard that she was suffering the natural sorrow. In the first place, there was selfishness enough in him to have taken pleasure in the idea that his great love might come in to comfort and console her; much the same kind of strange passionate pleasure which comes stinging through a mother's heart, when her drooping infant nestles close to her, and is dependent upon her for everything.