The best Adam Bede quotes

Perhaps, too, he is angry with us; else why does the blight come, and the bad harvests, and the fever, and all sorts of pain and trouble?

- Dinah Morris

There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.

Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.

If you've got a man's heart and soul in you, you can't be easy a making your own bed an' leaving the rest to lie on the stones.

- Adam Bede

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

She hates everything that is not what she longs for.

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.