Context
Plot Overview
Character List
Analysis of Major Characters
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Book First, Chapters I, II, III, and IV
Book First, Chapters IV, V, and VI
Book First, Chapters VIII through XIII
Book First, Chapters XII and XIII
Book Second, Chapters I, II, and III
Book Second, Chapters IV, V, VI, and VII
Book Third, Chapters I, II, and III
Book Third, Chapters IV, V, and VI
Book Third, Chapters VII, VIII, and IX
Book Fourth, Chapters I, II, and III
Book Fifth, Chapters I, II, and III
Book Fifth, Chapters IV, V, VI, and VII
Book Sixth, Chapters I, II, III, and IV
Book Sixth, Chapters IV, V, VII, and VIII
Book Fifth, Chapters IX, X, and XI
Book Sixth, Chapters XII, XIII, and XIV
Book Seventh, Chapters I, II, and III
Book Seventh, Chapters IV, V, and VI
Important Quotations Explained
Key Facts
Study Questions and Essay Topics
Quiz
Suggestions for Further Reading
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The Mill on the Floss George Eliot
Important Quotations Explained
It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love—this hunger of the heart—as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.
Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of circumstances.
I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness [of the Tullivers and Dodsons]; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie—how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
Was it possible to quarrel with a creature who had such eyes—defying and deprecating, contradicting and clinging, imperious and beseeching—full of delicious opposites? To see such a creature subdued by love for one would be a lot worth having.
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