Some quotes from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

"...her presence was enough, like that of the evening light."

Note: As a teacher, my dream is that my students might think of me this way. I don't need to be always talking, lecturing, instructing, pontificating, or show-boating. Perhaps my calm and gentle presence in the classroom is sometimes, like evening light, enough.


"[He was greeted by her] with the usual quietude which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water."


"Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us."