Love

“Near the brick grave there was a tomb erected very soon after the flood for two bodies that were found in close embrace, and it was visited at different moments by two men who both felt that their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were forever buried there.
One of them visited the tomb again with a sweet face beside him – but that was years after.
The other was always solitary. His great companionship was among the trees of the Red Deeps, where the buried joy seemed still to hover like a revisiting spirit.”

The Mill on the Floss

“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 oursleves 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?”

-George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss)