Silas Marner (Amazon Classics)

by George Eliot

To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring;

Marner’s inward life had been a history and a metamorphosis, as that of every fervid nature must be when it has fled, or been condemned, to solitude.

A less truthful man than he might have been tempted into the subsequent creation of a vision in the form of resurgent memory; a less sane man might have believed in such a creation;

there is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent.”

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas—where

A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.

He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him.

mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then.

You never hold trumps, you know—I always do. You’ve got the beauty, you see, and I’ve got the luck,

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature;

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction,

The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.

A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones;

Instead of trying to still his fears, he encouraged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all, that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come;

Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in.

for if there’s any good, we’ve need of it i’ this world.”