Middlemarchisms

I’m only a quarter-way through, but I already have a surfeit of wisdoms from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

… the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.

“He has got no red blood in his body,” said Sir James.
“No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semi-colons and parenthesis,” said Mrs Cadwallader.

But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference on the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with a dramatis personae folded in her hand.

And on Dorothea’s sister Celia:

The younger had always worn a yoke: but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?