Nick Newman

“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself-it only requires opportunity. You do not suppose Dempster had any motive for drinking beyond the craving for drink; the presence of brandy was the only necessary condition.

And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own. A whole park full of tame or timid-eyed animals to torment at his will would not serve him so well to glut his lust of torture; they could not feel as one woman does; they could not throw out the keen retort which whets the edge of hatred.

[...] poor Janet's soul was kept like a vexed sea, tossed by a new storm before the old waves have fallen.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin'; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“The important thing, she insists, is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality. Then anybody will do anything for you.”
― Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“For the wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life