“I shall not easily forget a walk through the grounds on one of those tender misty February days when there is a stir and quiver of song in every tree.”

Remembering a landscape where mist, trees and birdsong heightened a sense of mystery · Letter to Mrs Wolfsohn, quoted in Richard Garnett's Memoir (1900)

• Beauty
• Memory
• Nature

“A rigidity as unnatural as it is dangerous would be the result of too tenacious a clinging to inherited memories.”

Warning against allowing inherited memory to harden into social rigidity · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

• Memory
• Time
• Truth

“This unwavering faithfulness to the traditions of the past may become a curse to the living.”

Warning that loyalty to inherited tradition can burden the present · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

• Memory
• Time
• Truth

“Every author usually writes one book, which he might more or less justly entitle 'My Confessions,' into which he pours an intimate part of his life under a thin disguise of fiction.”

Suggesting that one work often contains an author's most intimate disguised self-portrait · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

• Art
• Memory
• Truth

“An autobiography such as this Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff—a book in the nude, breathing and palpitating with life so to say—has never, to my knowledge, been given to the world.”

Presenting autobiography as an unusually direct exposure of living consciousness · Introduction to The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890)

• Art
• Memory
• Truth