George Eliot

voice of one who is deaf and loving.

intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,–that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?

Tom became more like a girl than he had ever been in his life before.

Tom, I beg him to consider that there are feminine virtues which are with difficulty combined, even if they are not incompatible.

too much in him of the fibre that turns to true manliness, and to protecting pity for the weak.

There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs.

the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.

brown hair round it waved and curled at the ends like a girl's;

wants are not easily starved to death,

A boy born with a deficient power of apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his congenital deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg shorter than the other.