Important Quotations Explained
1. To
have sought a medical explanation for this phenomenon would have
been held by Silas himself, as well as by his minister and fellow-members,
a willful self-exclusion from the spiritual significance that might
lie therein.
2. Strangely
Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant
mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced
the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which
has no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to look
trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see
only one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for
which they hunted everywhere; and he was so withered and yellow,
that, though he was not yet forty, the children always called him
“Old Master Marner.”
3. This
strangely novel situation of opening his trouble to his Raveloe
neighbours, of sitting in the warmth of a hearth not his own, and
feeling the presence of faces and voices which were his nearest
promise of help, had doubtless its influence on Marner, in spite
of his passionate preoccupation with his loss. Our consciousness
rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than
without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before
we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
4. Godfrey
was silent. He was not likely to be very penetrating in his judgments,
but he had always had a sense that his father's indulgence had not
been kindness, and had had a vague longing for some discipline that
would have checked his own errant weakness and helped his better
will.
5. I
can't say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should
never have married anybody else. But I wasn't worth doing wrong
for—nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand—not
even our marrying wasn't, you see.
