407 Quotes by Elizabeth Gaskell

Molly suddenly felt as if she could scarcely keep from crying – a minute ago he had been so near to her, and talking so pleasantly and confidentially; and now he almost seemed as if he had forgotten her existence.

He came up straight to her father, whose hands he took and wrung without a word – holding them in his for a minute or two, during which time his face, his eyes, his look, told of more sympathy than could be put into words.

Oh dear! how she could have loved him if he had but been different, with a difference which she felt, on reflection, to be one that went low – deep down.

I did not think I had been so old,′ said Margaret after a pause of silence; and she turned away sighing. ‘Yes!’ said Mr. Bell. ‘It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive.

I don’t believe there’s a man in Milton who knows how to sit still; and it is a great art.

But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under?

It is part of His plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good; but surely it’s also part of His plan that as much of the burden of suffering as can be should be lightened by those whom it is His pleasure to make happy and content in their own circumstances.

If a wish could have transported her, she would have gone off; just for one day.

Looking back upon the year’s accumulated heap of troubles, Margaret wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them, how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time! And yet day by day had, of itself, and by itself, been very endurable – small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoyment having come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows.