Mia

“Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbors’ lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The business was established and had old roots; is it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace and another accept an investment in an old one? The profits made out of lost souls—where can the line be drawn at which they begin in human transactions? Was it not even God’s way of saving His chosen?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose
another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest
amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for
everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or
the future; how could you lose what you don’t have?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“…there was the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid—where the sense of connection with a manifold pregnant existence had to be kept up painfully as an inward vision, instead of coming from without in claims that would have shaped her energies.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch