George Eliot

Besides all this, he had read his Bible, including the apocryphal books; […]

[...] Maggie [...] had stolen unperceived to her father's elbow again, listening with parted lips, while she held her doll topsy-turvy, and crushed its nose against the wood of the chair— [...]

On this mighty tide the black ships [...] are borne along to the town of St Ogg's, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river brink, tinging the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun.

"Now, father," said Nancy, "is there any call for you to go home to tea? Mayn't you just as well stay with us?--such a beautiful evening as it's likely to be."

[H]is love and his hatred were of that passionate fervour which subjugates all the rest of the being, and makes a man sacrifice himself to his passion as if it were a deity to be worshipped with self-destruction.

Fred's voice had taken a tone of grumbling remonstrance, [...]

[T]hey had both been educated [...] on plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy the disadvantages of their orphaned condition.

Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and bric-à-brac, but likable.

"Don’t speak of my painting before Naumann," said Will. "He will tell you, it is all pfuscherei, which is his most opprobrious word!"

[G]oodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, [...]

[…] the other medical visitors having a consultative influence, but no power to contravene Lydgate’s ultimate decisions;

There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the world to do dirty business; and Will protested to himself that his share in bringing Mr. Brooke through would be quite innocent.

[...] Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'

Mrs. Meyrick’s house was not noisy: the front parlor looked on the river, and the back on gardens, so that though she was reading aloud to her daughters, the window could be left open to freshen the air of the small double room where a lamp and two candles were burning.

Why should we [...] use it [our sense of the ludicrous] to degrade the healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be degraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, finds matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, [...?]