Lin > Lin's Quotes

“The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books.”
― George Gissing

“It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.”
― George Gissing

“Poverty makes a crime of every indulgence.”
― George Gissing, The Nether World

“It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .”
― George Gissing

“Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion.”
― George Gissing

“Nowhere is the English genius of domesticity more notably evident than in the festival of afternoon tea. The [...] chink of cups and the saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.”
― George R. Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

“The result will be something unutterably tedious.”
― George Gissing

“He liked to feel the soft little hand clasping his own fingers, so big and coarse in comparison, and happily so strong. For in the child's weakness he felt an infinite pathos; a being so entirely helpless, so utterly dependent upon others' love, standing there amid a world of cruelties, smiling and trustful.”
― George Gissing

“To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.”
― George R. Gissing

“Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.”
― George Gissing

“How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.”
― George Gissing

“But we have no money. Suffer as we may, there's no help for it—because we have no money. Lives may be wasted—worse, far worse than wasted—just because there is no money. At this moment a whole world of men and women is in pain and sorrow—because they have no money. How often have we said that? The world is made so; everything has to be bought with money.”
― George Gissing, The Nether World

“Let beauty perish if it cannot ally itself with mind.”
― George Gissing, The Odd Women

“. . . the love of a man and a woman who can think intelligently may be the best thing life has to offer them.”
― George Gissing, The Odd Women

“The best moments of life are those when we contemplate beauty in the purely artistic spirit — objectively.”
― George Gissing, New Grub Street

“Do you know anything about Arromanches? A very quiet little spot on the Normandy coast. You get to it by an hour's coach from Bayeux. Not infested by English.”
― George Gissing, The Odd Women

“[A] sensitive man who no longer finds himself on equal terms with his natural associates, shrinks into loneliness, and learns with some surprise how very willing people are to forget his existence. London is a wilderness abounding in anchorites -- voluntary or constrained.”
― George Gissing

“Her womanhood went eagerly to meet him.”
― George Gissing, New Grub Street

“The art of living is the art of compromise.”
― George Gissing, New Grub Street

“Time is money — says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth — money is time. [...] What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time? And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other.”
― George Gissing

“Only English folk know what is meant by gravy; consequently, the English alone are competent to speak on the question of sauce.”
― George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

“Since the publication of his first book he had avoided as far as possible all knowledge of what the critics had to say about him; his nervous temperament could not bear the agitation of reading these remarks, which, however inept, define an author and his work to so many people incapable of judging for themselves.”
― George Gissing, New Grub Street

“To stab the root of a young tree, to hang crushing burdens upon it, to rend off its early branches — that is not the treatment likely to result in growth such as nature purposed. There will come of it a vicious formation, and the principle applies also to the youth of men.”
― George Gissing, Complete Works of George Gissing

“Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual, with rights and obligations independent of their wifely condition.”
― George Gissing, The Odd Women