407 Quotes by Elizabeth Gaskell

Ask, and it shall be given until you. That is no vain or untried promise, Ruth!

Yet is was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning.

If they came sorrowing, and wanting sympathy in a complicated trouble like the present, then they would be felt as a shadow in all these houses of intimate acquaintances, not friends.

For all his pain, he longed to see the author of it. Although he hated Margaret at times, when he thought of that gentle familiar attitude and all the attendant circumstances, he had a restless desire to renew her picture in his mind – a longing for the very atmosphere she breathed. He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.

I had such a mother as few are blest with; a woman of strong power, and firm resolve.

The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes – when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities.

Only you’re right in saying she’s too good an opinion of herself to think of you. The saucy jade! I should like to know where she’d find a better!

I say Gibson, we’re old friends, and you’re a fool if you take anything I say as an offense. Madam your wife and I didn’t hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won’t say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn’t me!

She found Nicholas busily engaged in making a penny spin on the dresser, for the amusement of three little children, who were clinging to him in a fearless manner. He, as well as they, was smiling at a good long spin;.