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

“...the whole sky overhead seemed trembling under the shock of the footprints of the storm.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“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