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

[steepholm]

I've recently seen this rather facile apercu attributed to George Eliot, but without a specific source. Is it genuine? It seems a most un-Eliotic thought to me. Having Middlemarch fairly fresh in my mind, it strikes me that it's a book all about the realization that it's too late to be what one might have been. Look at Lydgate! Look at Casaubon! Look at Lydgate again!

I've not read all of Eliot by any means, and maybe she has her lapses into airheaded optimism, but I find it hard to imagine. I might have bought the quotation had it been attributed to Dickens, but even Scrooge can never be what he might have been - the contented husband of Belle. He can only be what he can still become, someone who "knows how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possesses the knowledge." Which may be better or may be worse, but certainly isn't the same.

Comments

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

It's from a 19th century novel by Dinah Maria Craik, sort of, who apparently has a few other quotes running around that get attributed to Eliot.

"You mean, Mr. Halifax, what I might have been. Now it is too late."

"There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world -- nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity -- shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'"

This is not to say that Eliot definitively didn't; nobody seems to have been able to find a source for sure, but that one seems likely.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that!

Mr Halifax's logic escapes me, I admit. If we have so little time at our disposal, then it's going to be harder, not easier, to put things back as they ought to have been and live that missed life. Had we world enough and time, I would still be in my prime...

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

I agree, but I admit I like the quote for all its logical fallacy. It was always related, in my head, to deciding to go to grad school relatively late after trying some other things that didn't work out.