Thoughts on death, by George

The great English author George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) died on this day in 1880. She wrote Silas Marner (the bane of school children everywhere) and The Mill on the Floss. Her masterpiece was Middlemarch.

She used a pen name, she said, to be taken seriously as a novelist.

Some of Eliot's passages about death:

"Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet."

"In every parting there is an image of death."

"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them."

"When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity."

And this about life:

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