The Mill on the Floss

Critique • Quotes • At the movies

Notable lines

A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.

— First line

"What does that signify? We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to."

But it's bad—it's bad," Mr. Tulliver added, sadly, checking this blamable exultation, "a woman's no business wi' being so clever; it'll turn to trouble, I doubt."

 

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call "God’s birds" because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?

 

Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse....

 

The tomb bore the names of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, and below their names it was written,— "In their death they were not divided.".

— Last line

 

Critique • Quotes • At the movies

See also:

Jane Eyre

The Woman in White

Little Dorrit

Buy the book:

The Mill on the Floss

On Twitter: