George Eliot

After wrongly being branded a thief, Silas Marner loses both his fiancee and his faith. Driven from the religious community where his reputation is so besmirched, the embittered Silas settles at Ravensloe, where he leads a reclusive life as a weaver. When an orphaned child finds her way into Silas's house he is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past.

Silas Marner

désirée

Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.

Maya Alexandrova

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

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings…[she] had a touch of refinement and fervour which came from no other teaching than that of tenderly-nurtured unvitiated feeling.

Silas Marner quotes

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