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“So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended.”

“In this strange world, made a hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense nature, have sat weaving, weaving—looking towards the end of his pattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle, and everything else but his immediate sensations”

“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

“Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

“He had inherited from his mother some acquaintance with medicinal herbs and their preparation—a little store of wisdom which she had imparted to him as a solemn bequest—but of late years he had had doubts about the lawfulness of applying this knowledge, believing that herbs could have no efficacy without prayer, and that prayer might suffice without herbs;

“he was believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith; and a peculiar interest had been centred in him ever since he had fallen, at a prayer-meeting, into a mysterious rigidity and suspension of consciousness, which, lasting for an hour or more, had been mistaken for death.”

“But while opinion concerning him had remained nearly stationary, and his daily habits had presented scarcely any visible change, 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 child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts."
—WORDSWORTH.”

“Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.”

There was nothing to conceal between them;they knew,had confessed their love,& they had renounced each other;they were going to part.Honor & conscience were going to divide them;Maggie,with that appeal from her inmost soul,had decided it;but surely they might cast a lingering look at each other across the gulf,before they turned away never to look again till that strange light had forever faded out of their eyes

“Oh, it is difficult,–life is very difficult! It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,–the ties that have made others dependent on us,–and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in Paradise, and

Oh, play something the while, Philip, what is that you are falling into?

Don't you know that? said Philip, bringing out the tune more definitely. It's from the 'Somnambula'–'Ah! perchè non posso odiarti.' I don't know the opera, but it appears the tenor is telling the heroine that he shall always love her though she may forsake him. You've heard me sing it to the English words, 'I love thee still.'

“Is there no other alternative, Maggie? Is that life, away from those who love you, the only one you will allow yourself to look forward to?"

"Yes, Philip. At least, as things are; I don't know what may be in years to come. But I begin to think there can never come much happiness to me from loving; I have always had so much pain mingled with it. I wish I could make myself a world outside it, as men do.”

But there came the necessity of walking home in the cool starlight,& with it the necessity of cursing his own folly,& bitterly determining that he would never trust himself alone with Maggie again.It was all madness;he was in love,thoroughly attached to Lucy, & engaged,–engaged as strongly as an honorable man need be. He wished he had never seen this Maggie Tulliver, to be thrown into a fever by her in this way;

“For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. "Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms,–"character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny.”

Was not Stephen Guest right in his decided opinion this slim maiden of eighteen was quite the sort of wife a man would not be likely to repent of marrying,a woman who was loving &thoughtful for other women,not giving them Judas-kisses with eyes askance on their welcome defects,but with real care &vision for their halfhidden pains &mortifications, with long ruminating enjoyment of little pleasures prepared for them?

“Stephen mastered the little hand that was straying toward the table, and touched it lightly with his lips. Little Lucy felt very proud and happy. She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion,–when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made,

“Maggie," he said, in a tone of remonstrance, "don't persist in this wilful, senseless privation. It makes me wretched to see you benumbing and cramping your nature in this way. You were so full of life when you were a child; I thought you would be a brilliant woman,–all wit and bright imagination. And it flashes out in your face still, until you draw that veil of dull quiescence over it.”

“Maggie went home, with an inward conflict already begun; Philip went home to do nothing but remember and hope. You can hardly help blaming him severely. He was four or five years older than Maggie, and had a full consciousness of his feeling toward her to aid him in foreseeing the character his contemplated interviews with her would bear in the opinion of a third person.”

I'm very grateful to you for thinking of me all those years. It is very sweet to have people love us. What a wonderful, beautiful thing it seems that God should have made your heart so that you could care about a queer little girl whom you only knew for a few weeks! I remember saying to you that I thought you cared for me more than Tom did.

"Ah, Maggie," you would never love me so well as you love your brother."

“Take that volume home with you, Maggie," said Philip,”I don't want it now. I shall make a picture of you instead,–you, among the Scotch firs and the slanting shadows."

"No, thank you," said Maggie,It would make me in love with this world again, as I used to be; it would make me long to see and know many things; it would make me long for a full life."

“I've been a great deal happier," she said at last, timidly, "since I have given up thinking about what is easy and pleasant, and being discontented because I couldn't have my own will. Our life is determined for us; and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and doing what is given us to do.”

“The words might have been those of a coquette, but the full, bright glance Maggie turned on Philip was not that of a coquette. She really did hope he liked her face as it was now, but it was simply the rising again of her innate delight in admiration and love. Philip met her eyes and looked at her in silence for a long moment, before he said quietly, "No, Maggie."

“I can't believe that you have thought of me so much as I have thought of you," said Philip, timidly. "Do you know, when I was away, I made a picture of you as you looked that morning in the study when you said you would not forget me.”
Philip drew a large miniature-case from his pocket, and opened it.

“The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown girl,–the only bit of furniture now on which she could bestow her anxiety and pride; and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic wish to have no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother about her hair, and submit to have the abundant black locks plaited into a coronet on the summit of her head, after the pitiable fashion of those antiquated times.”

It was when he got able to walk about & look at all the old objects he felt the strain of his clinging affection for the old home as part of his life,part of himself.He couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this,where he knew the sound of every gate door,& felt that the shape & color of every roof & weather-stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them

In books there were people who were always agreeable or tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt; it seemed to be a world where people behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love, and that did not belong to them. And if life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?

“The world isn't made of pen, ink, and paper, and if you're to get on in the world, young man, you must know what the world's made of. Now the best chance for you 'ud be to have a place on a wharf, or in a warehouse, where you'd learn the smell of things, but you wouldn't like that, I'll be bound; you'd have to stand cold and wet, and be shouldered about by rough fellows. You're too fine a gentleman for that.”

“If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.”

“People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes; and it seems superfluous, when we consider the remote geographical position of the Ethiopians, and how very little the Greeks had to do with them, to inquire further why Homer calls them "blameless.”