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Quote 4. Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it—if it were not the same earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers […]. Explanation and Analysis. The Mill on the Floss devotes a great amount of time to the mundane details of Tom and Maggie’s childhoods, such as their playtime activities, rituals, and fights. The reason for this intense focus on the seemingly insignificant events of childhood, the narrator explains, is that those “thoughts and loves” of Maggie and Tom’s first years will influence their lives for years to come. The narrator points out that memory has a powerful emotional component, and that people often love things in the world precisely because they associate it with old memories. Most of the things people love, the narrator suggests, have some sort of sentimental memory attached to it, and this is certainly also the case for Tom and Maggie.