“Careful, delicate, faithful work, no matter on what article expended, was the note of excellence, and the longer I live the more I respect and love it.”

Honouring craftsmanship through patience, fidelity and attention to detail · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Art
• Love
• Time

“It is a sad reflection—the waste of valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.”

Lamenting how life can squander what matters while preserving what does not · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Despair
• Mortality
• Time

“If one could throw delicate scruples to the winds and tell the whole story of any human life, or portion of life, however small, the long reign of the work of fiction would be over.”

Suggesting that ordinary lives contain material richer than invented stories · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Art
• Time
• Truth

“Also, it is not until a woman is sixty, or thereabouts, that she is really free to enjoy herself.”

A wry celebration of the freedom that can accompany later life · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Hope
• Joy
• Time

“To a people so wandering and restless, books in quantities become physically burdensome; they take up too much room in a temporary house, and are too costly as travelling furniture.”

A practical observation on the tension between a love of books and an unsettled life · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Art
• Time

“That the world is for the young is Nature's own decree; if we, who are no longer of that fortunate company, cannot see it, we ought.”

Accepting generational change as a natural condition rather than a grievance · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Mortality
• Nature
• Time

“I can never think of it without thinking what life would be if men and women loved each other like that.”

Using an animal's devotion to imagine a more faithful form of human love · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Friendship
• Love
• Time

“In fact, housework has all along been the business of life; novels have been squeezed into the odd times.”

A revealingly dry summary of how literary work fitted around domestic labour · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Art
• Time

“All such losses have been amply compensated for, no doubt—I am not of those who, having outlived them, insist that the old times were better than the new—but they are losses, notwithstanding.”

Holding nostalgia and acceptance together without idealising the past · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Memory
• Time
• Truth

“There is no trace of an English home to go back to now.”

A stark expression of exile and the irreversible loss of home · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Memory
• Time

“For more than thirty years we have not met, and there have been long gaps in our correspondence; but friendship has survived all, unchanged.”

Celebrating friendship that endures despite distance and long silences · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Friendship
• Memory
• Time

“Railroads and aeroplanes move too swiftly to allow a slow, secluded maturing such as the older folk-songs had.”

Recognising how technological change alters the growth of oral tradition · Review, Mr. Lomax's Second Anthology

• Poetry
• Time

“I feel as if I could listen to that tune forever.”

Expressing complete absorption in music touched by melancholy and landscape · Mearing Stones, Summer Dusk

• Beauty
• Music
• Time

“Life is change; and to be seeing new wonders every day—the thrown sea, the silver rush of the meadow, the lights in distant towns—is to be living, and not merely existing.”

Celebrating curiosity and continual discovery as essential parts of being alive · Mearing Stones, Change

• Joy
• Nature
• Time

“Art is an odd thing, isn't it? It's almost the only thing that seems to me to remain unchanged throughout one's life.”

Seeing art as a rare continuity across the changes of a lifetime · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Time

“That's the charming thing about great writing, it's never the same twice over.”

On how great literature changes as the reader changes · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Time

“There's no pathos of age except where it touches humanity.”

Locating the poignancy of age in human experience rather than mere antiquity · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Mortality
• Time

“Funny, what waste of time all doing seems by the side of being! And yet I know that the least little thing done is better than all this fine dreaming.”

Balancing contemplative delight against the value of action · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Time
• Truth

“To catch the sun and keep him in a book—what a hopeless business! Yet never twice the same clouds gather round him touched with the same colours; it is human to grasp at them.”

On the human urge to preserve beauty that cannot be repeated · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897

• Beauty
• Nature
• Time

“Joy is a host of happinesses, each quite unlike all the rest.”

Recognising joy as a succession of distinct and unrepeatable moments · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1896

• Joy
• Time

“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

“From the present she turned to the past, from the native to the foreign, from the domestic to the historical.”

A compact description of an artist deliberately changing imaginative territory · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

• Art
• Time

“At the same time, it seems, that no progress could well be made in the evolution of society without these departures on the part of individuals from the well-beaten tracks.”

Arguing that departures from convention are necessary to social development · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

• Freedom
• Hope
• Time