Writing in Saturday Review (23 October 1971), p. 16
1970s
“That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.”
Prelude
Middlemarch (1871)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
George Eliot 300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880Related quotes
Source: 27 February 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
"Epitaph", written for himself (1833)
“A life cut tragically short, but with more colour perhaps than one may find in her work.”
Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 4 (p. 24)
[The Quest for beauty, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/01/quest/index.html, June 16 2006]
Source: Calculated Risk (1950), p. 1
Context: A soldier's life in combat is an endless series of decisions that mean success or failure, and perhaps life or death for himself or his comrades. The rifleman crawling through the rubble of a bombed-out street must decide on the best moment to escape enemy fire as he dodges from one doorway to the next. He must take a chance. The general seeking to break an enemy defense line and destroy his forces must decide just when and how to strike and precisely to what extent he dare weaken one sector of his front in order to mass overpowering strength at the main point of attack. He, too, must take a chance, although, in the stilted phraseology of military communiqués, he calls it a "calculated risk".
"Summer in Algiers" http://books.google.com/books?id=N0bNUqDVKJgC&q=%22If+there+is+a+sin+against+life+it+consists+perhaps+not+so+much+in+despairing+of+life+as+in+hoping+for+another+life+and+in+eluding+the+implacable+grandeur+of+this+life%22&pg=PA153#v=onepage, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955)