Top 380 Elizabeth Gaskell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 8

51. “By-and-by they’ll find out, tyrants makes liars.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

52. “She lay with her face to the wall, muttering low, but muttering always: Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! what is done in youth can never be undone in age!”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

53. “All this gladness in life, all honest pride in doing my work in the world, all this keen sense of being, I owe to her!” And it doubles the gladness, it makes the pride glow, it sharpens the sense of existence till I hardly know if it is pain or pleasure, to think that I owe it to one – to one whom I love, as I do not believe man ever loved woman before.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

54. “My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

55. “Nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men. Dying is nothing to it.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

56. “That kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

57. “I am a man. I claim the right of expressing my feelings.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

58. “Oh yes!? and suddenly the wintry frost-bound look of care had left Mr. Thornton’s face, as if some soft summer gale had blown all anxiety away from his mind; and, though his mouth was as much compressed as before, his eyes smiled out benignly on his questioner.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

59. “In all disappointments sympathy is a great balm.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

60. “I never did write a biography, and I don’t exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

61. “Was he bewitched by those beautiful eyes, that soft, half-open, sighing mouth which lay so close upon his shoulder only yesterday? He could not even shake off the recollection that she had been there; that her arms had been round him, once – if never again.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

62. “His greatest comfort was in hugging his torment; and in feeling, as he had indeed said to her, that though she might despise him, contemn him, treat him with her proud sovereign indifference, he did not change one whit. She could not make him change. He loved her and would love her; and defy her, and this miserable bodily pain.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

63. “Miss Jenkyns wore a cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

64. “A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

65. “It is to God you answer, not to men. The shame of having your sin known to the world, should be as nothing to the shame you felt at having sinned. We have dreaded men too much, and God too little, in the course we have taken.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

66. “Oh, my Margaret – my Margaret! no one can tell what you are to me! Dead – cold as you lie there you are the only woman I ever loved! Oh, Margaret – Margaret!”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

67. “One may be clogged with honey and unable to rise and fly.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

68. “My precept is, “Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

69. “Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

70. “I have passed out of childhood into old age. I have had no youth – no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me – for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same fearful spirit.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

71. “I would not trust a mouse to a woman if a man’s judgment could be had.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

72. “Real meekness of character is called out by experience of kindness.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

73. “It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

74. “If she lives, she shall be my wedded wife. If she dies – mother, I can’t speak of what I shall feel if she dies.” His voice was choked in his throat.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

75. “By degrees they spoke of education, and the book-learning that forms one part of it; and the result was that Ruth determined to get up early all throughout the bright summer mornings, to acquire the knowledge hereafter to be give to her child. Her mind was uncultivated, her reading scant; beyond the mere mechanical arts of education she knew nothing; but she had a refined taste, and excellent sense and judgment to separate the true from the false.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

76. “The vices of the poor sometimes astound us HERE; but when the secrets of all hearts shall be made known, their virtues will astound us in far greater degree. Of this I am certain.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

77. “Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

78. “He shook hands with Margaret. He knew it was the first time their hands had met, though she was perfectly unconscious of the fact.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

79. “Sally, do you think God has put us into the world just to be selfish, and do nothing but see after our own souls? or to help one another with heart and hand, as Christ did to all who wanted help?”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

80. “Let us alone, little woman. We understand each other, don’t we, doctor? Why, bless your life, he gives me better than he gets many a time; only, you see, he sugars it over, and says a sharp thing, and pretends it’s all civility and humility; but I can tell when he’s giving me a pill.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

81. “Really it is very wholesome exercise, this trying to make one’s words represent one’s thoughts, instead of merely looking to their effect on others.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

82. “But how would you have a wedding arranged?’ ‘Oh, I have never thought much about it; only I should like it to be a very fine summer morning; and I should like to walk to church through the shade of trees;.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

83. “I could wish there were a God, if it were only to ask him to bless thee.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

84. “He shrank from hearing Margaret’s very name mentioned; he, while he blamed her – while he was jealous of her – while he renounced her – he loved her sorely, in spite of himself.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

85. “Honi soit qui mal y pense.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

86. “But ne’er mind. We’re but where we was; and I’ll break stones on th’ road afore I let these little uns clem.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

87. “I sometimes think he’s half a woman himself, he spends so much money and is so unreasonable.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

88. “Why, they took nouns that were signs of things which gave evidence of wealth, – housekeepers, under-gardeners, extent of glass, valuable lace, diamonds, and all such things; and each one formed her speech so as to bring them all in, in the prettiest accidental manner possible.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

89. “But Mr. Hale resolved that he would not be disturbed by any such nonsensical idea; so he lay awake, determining not to think about it.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

90. “He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so hard to compensate himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked upon her with an admiration he could not repress, she looked at him with proud indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he told himself – was a great fellow, with not a grace or a refinement about him.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

91. “Ask, and it shall be given until you. That is no vain or untried promise, Ruth!”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

92. “She tried to comfort herself with the idea, that what he imagined her to be, did not alter the fact of what she was. But it was a truism, a phantom, and broke down under the weight of her regret. She.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

93. “Every mile was redolent of associations, which she would not have missed for the world, but each of which made her cry upon ‘the days that are no more’ with ineffable longing.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

94. “I don’t believe there’s a man in Milton who knows how to sit still; and it is a great art.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

95. “Her thoughts are full of other things just now; and people have such different ways of showing feeling: some by silence, some by words.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

96. “All the earth, though it were full of kind hearts, is but a desolation and desert place to a mother when her only child is absent.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

97. “For all his pain, he longed to see the author of it. Although he hated Margaret at times, when he thought of that gentle familiar attitude and all the attendant circumstances, he had a restless desire to renew her picture in his mind – a longing for the very atmosphere she breathed. He was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the fatal centre.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

98. “But the trees were gorgeous in their autumnal leafiness – the warm odours of flowers and herb came sweet upon the sense.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

99. “She used to sit long hours upon the beach, gazing intently on the waves as they chafed with perpetual motion against the pebbly shore, – or she looked out upon the more distant heave, and sparkle against the sky, and heard, without being conscious of hearing, the eternal psalm, which went up continually.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

100. “Miss Benson had the power; which some people have, of carrying her wishes through to fulfillment; her will was strong, her sense was excellent, and people yielded to her – they did not know why.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell