It was early 2008 when I recall reading her work, “The Mill on the Floss,” and noting that was an author with much intellectual agency. It had taken me a few discussions amongst fellow students and classes with the professor to get an understanding of what she was doing with her philosophical candor. She packs so many references into her fiction, giving us small notes as to how well read she was; she almost pokes fun at other works on every page of her work, it’s crazy.

And of course, pop culture made a mockery of her life, her looks and her works, as the New Yorker uncovers from tweets, writing the following:

“If George Eliot’s Wikipedia entry has received an unusually high number of views this week, the responsibility lies with Lena Dunham, who tweeted a couple of days ago that the Victorian novelist’s page was “the soapiest most scandalous thing you’ll read this month. Thesis: she was ugly AND horny!”

Mainstream aside, this lady had a mind to be reckoned with, studied, and most importanlty, respected. Being a philosophical champion and forward thinker, George Elliot understood very well how powerful words can be and how much they effect our thoughts. She wrote very forward thinking content for her readers to digest. Here are some of her most positive quotes for feelling good.

George Elliot Quotes to Make You Feel Strong

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” 

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion”

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

If you enjoyed this light hearted article on George Elliot, check out some of our other Literary content at The Ritual blog thread here.

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

“If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”

“If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for ’em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that’s where it is.”

While reading “The Mill on the Floss,” by Goerge Elliot, I learned about Sappho, the Greek lyric poet, born in Lesbos, probably in the seventh century BCE. This character, I believe, was used to foreshadow the flood at the end, because, you see, there was a legendary belief that she drowned herself for love after leaving Lesbos for political reasons and going to Sicily. She wrote love poetry, and her name is used to suggest female power and passion.

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude…”

George Elliot, 1819 – 1880

Georget Elliot

George Elliot was one of the leading English novelists of the 19th century. More famously known for “Adam Bede” (1859), “The Mill on the Floss” (1860), “Silas Marner” (1861), “Middlemarch” (1871–72), and “Daniel Deronda” (1876). As a saggitarius, she expired at the age of 61.

Who was the better at writing about drinking – Bukowski or Hemingway? While we may never be able to sit and drink with these two creatives in a beer pong match, we can still hypothesize about what a match between these two would have been like. Below I have collated some of the best quotes about drinking from these two writing canons.

Bukoswki Quotes about Writing and Drinking

1. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.
2. Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
3. My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.
4. I’m just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.
5. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
6. We really had nothing to do but drink wine and make love.
7. “That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

If are enjoying reading these wacked out alcoholic quotes about drinking from Hemingway and Bukowski, check out the Writers Corner at the Ritual Blog.

Hemingway Quotes about Writing and Drinking

Drinkers learn cocktail etiquette many ways, and from many sources, but for my money, there is no better drinking guru than Ernest Hemingway.

1. “Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares. If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.”
2. “Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey.”
3. “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
4. When asked about drinking while working, Hemingway once responded, “Jesus Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.”
5. In the postscript to a letter to critic Ivan Kaskin in 1935, Hemingway wrote, “When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?… The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”
6. I drink to make other people more interesting.
7. Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.
8. All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.
9. Drinking wine was not a snobbism or a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.

About Hemingway and Bukowski

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. Charles Bukowski was a prolific underground writer who used his poetry and prose to depict the depravity of urban life and the downtrodden in American society. A cult hero, Bukowski relied on experience, emotion, and imagination in his work, using direct language and violent and sexual imagery. Charles Bukowski was born August 16, 1920, and died of Leukemia on March 9, 1994.

Ernest Hemingway was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho. Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations.

In no way do I mean to offend anybody about comparing what Hemingway and Bukowski wrote about drinking. I merely wish to provide some speculative entertainment. I hope you enjoyed or got a slight chuckle out of these.