Home > Author > George Gissing
41 " Confound it! It's just because nobody does anything that things have come to this pass! "
― George Gissing , New Grub Street
42 " . . . the love of a man and a woman who can think intelligently may be the best thing life has to offer them. "
― George Gissing , The Odd Women
43 " The simple, sober truth has no chance whatever of being listened to, and it’s only by volume of shouting that the ear of the public is held. What "
44 " To the relatively poor (who are so much worse off than the poor absolutely) education is in most cases a mocking cruelty. "
45 " Ten to one she had in mind some idiot heroine of a book. "
46 " My aim is to have easy command of all the pleasures desired by a cultivated man. I want to live among beautiful things, and never to be troubled by a thought of vulgar difficulties. I want to travel and enrich my mind in foreign countries. I want to associate on equal terms with refined and interesting people. I want to be known, to be familiarly referred to, to feel when I enter a room that people regard me with some curiosity. "
47 " Hence a rather excessive politeness, such as the man who sets much store on breeding exhibits to those who may at any moment, even in a fraction of a syllable, prove themselves his inferiors. "
― George Gissing , Born in Exile
48 " Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders. In "
49 " I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society"."If society were really decent, he would have been "
― George Gissing
50 " Dora kept her eyes down, and smiled ambiguously. "
51 " No, my dear. We happen to be going to the root of things, that's all. Perhaps it's as well to do so now and then. "
52 " He pronounced his Latin in the new-old way, with Continental vowels. The effect of this on an Englishman's lips is always more or less pedantic, and in his case it was intolerable. "
53 " That of the British Museum Reading-room,’ explained Jasper; ‘known to some of us as the valley of the shadow of books. People who often work there necessarily get to know each other by sight. In the same way I knew Miss Yule’s father when I happened to pass him in the road yesterday. "
54 " A man who comes to be hanged,' pursued Jasper, impartially, 'has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.' 'In "
55 " The earning of money should be a means to an end; for more than thirty years--I began to support myself at sixteen--I had to regard it as the end itself. "
― George Gissing , The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
56 " It took a long time before I had taught myself how to move and speak like one of the class to which I belonged by right of intellect. "
57 " Poverty doesn’t allow of honourable feeling, any more than of compassion. "
58 " One doesn’t like to do brutal things if one can avoid them, you know. "
59 " The sum of their faults was their inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability does not call for unmingled disdain. "
60 " He was in spring costume, and exhaled fresh odours. The "