I cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult.

The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

When the commonplace We must all die transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness I must die-- and soon, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

I will wait till after Christmas." What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worthwhile to set about anything we are disinclined to.

My life is too short, and God's work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.

One way to approach the book today might be to think of it not as an intimidating, monolithic entity, but as its original readers experienced it—as eight utterly manageable short books to be read over the leisurely course of a year. Another way might be to admit that you do have time to read an eight-hundred-page book, perhaps even according to a swifter timetable than that of George Eliot's first readers. You just need to reorder your priorities.

Ah, I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the babbies, said Mrs. Poyser; they're satisfied wi' looking, no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep.

I thought we should never part with that while we lived; everything is going away from us; the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!

In the midst of life we are in death" — how the present moment is all we can call our own for works of mercy, of righteous dealing, and of family tenderness. All very old truths — but what we thought the oldest truth becomes the most startling to us in the week when we have looked on the dead face of one who has made a part of our own lives. For

There's Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying' among 'em. I read

'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'