"Thus souls, by nature pitched too high,
By sufferings plunged too low"

"‘Now lisen to me, Maggie: I’ll tell you what I mean. You’re always in extremes - you have no judgement and self-command; and yet you think you know best, and will not submit to be guided….’"

"Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best argued probabilities against them."

"‘Yes Maggie,’ said Philip vehemently, ‘and you are shutting yourself up in a narrow self-delusive fanaticism which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into duoness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed - that you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance - to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you….’"

"… there is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room: human beings, mere men and women, without furniture, without anything to offer you, who have ceased to count as anybody, present an embarrassing negation of reasons for wishing to see them, or subjects on which to converse with them."

"It was a dark, chill, misty morning, likely to end in rain - one of those mornings when even happy people take refuge in their hopes."

"Maggie moreover had rather a tenderness for deformed things; she preferred the wry-necked lambs, because it seemed to her that the lambs which were quite strong and well made wouldn’t mind so much about being petted, and she was especially fond of petting objects that would think it very delightful to be petted by her."

"Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every slopping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of colour; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees till it fell from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates were all blocked up with the slopping drifts, and here and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified ‘in unrecumbent sadness;’ there was still no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens too were one still pale cloud - no sound or motion in anything but the dark river, that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the out-door world, for he meant to light up each home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of indoor colour, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food: he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star."

"He hurried downstairs and left poor Maggie to that bitter sense of the irrevocable which was almost an everyday experience of her small soul."

"It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love, this hunger of the heart: as peremptory as that of other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world."

"… there are plenty of hard words in there.’Brillig’ means four o’ clock in the afternoon - the time when you begin broiling things for dinner…. ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimely’. ‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active’. You see it’s like a portmanteau word - there are two meanings packed into one word… ‘toves’ are something like badgers - they’re something like lizards - and they’re something like corkscrews… also, they make their nests under sundials - also they live on cheese… To ‘gyre’ is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To ‘gimble’ is to make holes like a gimlet… ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you). And a ‘borogrove’ is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round - something like a live mop… a ‘rath’ is a sort of green pig: but ‘mome’ I’m not certain about. I think it’s short for ‘from home’ - meaning that they’d lost their way, you know… ‘outgribing’ is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle."

"sevot yhtils eht dna ,gillirb sawT
:ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD
,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA
.ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA"