Here are a cluster of quotes I loved from this month's reading: 

Mary believes "any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it." 

A stranger is considered all sorts of things, "known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions." 

"'I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike,' said Lydgate. 'But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than the other. I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the same way.'"

"'Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?'"

"'They really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.'"

Lydgate's "nature was keenly alive" to Farebrother's qualities. 

"The meditative process of shaving."