Success Quote by George Eliot

Anger and jealousy, Eliot suggests, aren’t just emotions; they’re surveillance systems. They “bear” - a word that carries both endurance and burden - to keep their objects in view because attention is the fuel that keeps them hot. The sting in the line is its symmetry: she grants love no moral monopoly on fixation. We like to imagine love as focus and hatred as distraction, but Eliot collapses that comfort. Obsession is morally promiscuous.

The phrasing “lose sight” is doing quiet work. It’s literal (watching, tracking, monitoring) and psychological (replaying, ruminating, keeping a person alive in your mind). Anger and jealousy are often advertised as reactions to an insult or a threat; Eliot frames them as relationships with their own loyalty. They don’t merely respond to an object - they need it. That’s the subtext: these feelings preserve the bond they claim to punish. Jealousy keeps the rival and the beloved in a tight triangle; anger keeps the offender permanently onstage. The emotion becomes a way of staying attached without admitting attachment.

In Eliot’s world, this is also social commentary. A 19th-century realist novelist is obsessed with how private passions harden into public behavior: gossip, moral policing, reputational warfare. “Losing sight” would mean relinquishing control, and control is what these emotions promise when vulnerability feels intolerable. The line lands because it refuses melodrama and offers a cold truth: love isn’t the only thing that can’t let go.