How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, "I’d do just the same again." This was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different. (1.6.87)
This is one of the best distinctions between Tom’s and Maggie’s characters. Their differing attitudes towards the past sheds a lot of light on their respective personalities. Tom is confident and decisive, while Maggie is compassionate and always worries about her actions and decisions.
Quote #2
Every one of those keen moments has left its trace and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrevocably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him [...] but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then [...]? (1.7.71)
This section gives a good run-down of the book’s views on memory and the significance of the past in forming a person’s character. Childhood in particular leaves lasting traces within a person’s personality, even if they can’t fully recapture the emotional intensity or reality of childhood as an adult. Memory, though powerful, is often very elusive, or hard to fully grasp.
Quote #3
It is a town "familiar with forgotten years." (1.12.2)
The line "familiar with forgotten years" is a quote from The Excursion by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth, like Eliot, was really interested in themes of memory and the past and he often explored those subjects in his poetry. Eliot uses this line here to describe the town of St. Ogg’s, which is in may ways stuck in the past even as it is modernizing and changing with things like industry.
Quote #4
There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants and has no long memories, no super-added life in the life of others; though we who look on think lightly of such premature despair, as if our vision of the future lightened the blind sufferer’s present. (3.5.72)
Once again, childhood memory and the distant past of childhood play a major thematic role. Eliot reiterates that, while adults often forget the specifics of childhood, the emotional intensity of their past experiences as children stay with them, however subconsciously. The emotional impact of the past is inescapable.
Quote #5
Whenever his mind was wandering in the far past, he fell into this oblivion of their actual faces: they were not those of the lad and the little wench who belonged to that past. (3.8.13)
After he falls ill, Mr. Tulliver seems to live solely in the past. This may be psychological on his part though – since the present is so painful Mr. Tulliver escapes into the past.
Quote #6
She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, and the "Christian Year" (no longer rejected as a ‘hymn-book’) that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories [...] (4.3.43)
Maggie seems to be practically brainwashing herself here. She reads her books so often that they continually echo in her mind and effectively blot out any other thoughts and memories that she might have. Replacing her old memories is a way to escape from pain.
Quote #7
And so it remains to all time, a lasting record of human needs and human consolations, the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced [...] but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness. (4.3.41)
Though Eliot is writing about the Thomas à Kempis book that Maggie discovers, this passage speaks to the novels views on the past and history as a whole. Essentially people are connected across time here and voices from the past can reach out and actively influence the present. This may be why Maggie so strongly refuses to abandon her past – it is still speaking to her, in a sense.
Quote #8
"Perhaps not," said Maggie, simply, "but then, you know, the first thing I ever remember in my life is standing with Tom by the side of the Floss while he held my hand - everything before that is dark to me." (5.1.54)
Maggie places a huge amount of emphasis on the past and tends to weight past events over present ones. This memory reveals the fact that Tom and the river are her very first memories, which in Maggie’s view gives them precedence over everything else in her life. If everything before this memory is "dark," then everything after it is somehow less.
Quote #9
And even after the first week Maggie began to be less haunted by her sad memories and anticipations. Life was certainly very pleasant just now. (6.6.3)
Occasionally Maggie does let herself be swept away in the present, as when she visits Lucy and begins enjoying high society life and the company of Stephen.
Quote #10
"That book never will be closed, Philip," she said, with grave sadness. "I desire no future that will break the ties of the past. But the tie to my brother is one of the strongest. I can do nothing willingly that will divide me always from him." (6.10.35)
Maggie completely sums up her views on the role of the past in her life and in her choices. Though she has a substantial history with Philip, her ties with Tom are older and are therefore stronger to her. Maggie refuses to let go of her past, but she has to grant weight to her oldest memories and bonds.