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She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part - vistas of probable triumphs - the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won. -- Thomas Hardy
It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers. -- Thomas Hardy
Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me! -- Thomas Hardy
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables? -- Thomas Hardy
Decisive action is seen by appreciative minds to be frequently objectless, and sometimes fatal; but decision, however suicidal, has more charm for a woman than the most unequivocal Fabian success. -- Thomas Hardy
It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness, -- Thomas Hardy
The pale lunar touches which make beauties of hags lent divinity to this face, already beautiful. -- Thomas Hardy
Away from courting me - " Gabriel expanded. "I'm sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear," he said, with a grateful sense of favours -- Thomas Hardy
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. -- Thomas Hardy
Stupors, however, do not last forever -- Thomas Hardy
The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain. -- Thomas Hardy
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel? -- Thomas Hardy
All things merge in one another - good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics ... -- Thomas Hardy
Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done. -- Thomas Hardy
When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land, And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas? -- Thomas Hardy
Don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine. Cultivate the art of renunciation. -- Thomas Hardy
To be loved to madness
such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover. -- Thomas Hardy
An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit. -- Thomas Hardy
A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly. -- Thomas Hardy
How people will talk about one's doings!" Fancy exclaimed.
"Well, if you make songs about yourself, my dear, you can't blame other people for singing 'em. -- Thomas Hardy
Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come within. -- Thomas Hardy
A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul. -- Thomas Hardy
I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect. -- Thomas Hardy
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. -- Thomas Hardy
She is a bold and passionate woman, fighting to earn respect as a farm owner and over the course of the novel she has to endure much suffering, which enhances her better qualities while diminishing some elements of her less admirable traits. -- Thomas Hardy
He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide.Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject and would not take him. -- Thomas Hardy
Distinction doesn't consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those whose are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report -- Thomas Hardy
There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love. -- Thomas Hardy
Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all - in fact, it rather does it good. -- Thomas Hardy
Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where? -- Thomas Hardy
The village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand. -- Thomas Hardy
I think of people more kindly when I am away from them. -- Thomas Hardy
What are my books but one plea against "man's inhumanity to man" --to woman-- and to the lower animals? -- Thomas Hardy
And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world's room, Oak walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders. -- Thomas Hardy
Cultivate the art of renunciation. -- Thomas Hardy
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things. -- Thomas Hardy
Fear is the mother of foresight. -- Thomas Hardy
The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from crown to toe. -- Thomas Hardy
Perhaps you are making a cat's paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems so
to see you sitting up there so prim. -- Thomas Hardy
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage. -- Thomas Hardy
The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. -- Thomas Hardy
I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly. -- Thomas Hardy
Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales - Full of sound and fury
- signifying nothing - he said no word at all. -- Thomas Hardy
Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection -- Thomas Hardy
You have never loved me as I love you
never
never! Yours is not a passionate heart
your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite
not a woman! -- Thomas Hardy
Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony. -- Thomas Hardy
And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman's most marked characteristic. -- Thomas Hardy
The fact is," said d'Uberville drily, "whatever your dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That's just like you women. Your mind is enslaved to his. -- Thomas Hardy
To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was. -- Thomas Hardy
Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said? -- Thomas Hardy
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more. -- Thomas Hardy
Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful. -- Thomas Hardy
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. -- Thomas Hardy
She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will. -- Thomas Hardy
Feeling had indeed smothered judgment that day. -- Thomas Hardy
Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken. -- Thomas Hardy
Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. -- Thomas Hardy
When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference. -- Thomas Hardy
Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women ... O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus? - Esdras. -- Thomas Hardy
She's brim full of poetry - actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She lives what paper-poets only write ... -- Thomas Hardy
She was but a transient impression, half forgotten. -- Thomas Hardy
What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real. -- Thomas Hardy
The first man he came to was running about in a great hurry, as if his thoughts were several yards in advance of his body, which they could never drag on fastt enough. -- Thomas Hardy
Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. -- Thomas Hardy
Ah, a time of his life shall come when he will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn - as I do now! -- Thomas Hardy
If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst. -- Thomas Hardy
The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There's sommat in our blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound ... -- Thomas Hardy
Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will live on a long time after nutriment has ceased -- Thomas Hardy
They washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water. "Which are my fingers and which are yours?" he said, looking up. "They are very much mixed." "They are all yours," said she, very prettily, -- Thomas Hardy
There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. -- Thomas Hardy
By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? -- Thomas Hardy
Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em? -- Thomas Hardy
To give too much room to the latent feeling which is rather common in these days among the unappreciated, that because some remarkably successful men are fools, all remarkably unsuccessful men are geniuses.' 'Pretty -- Thomas Hardy
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. -- Thomas Hardy
This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all. -- Thomas Hardy
When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover. -- Thomas Hardy
That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down the -- Thomas Hardy
I was court-martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence. -- Thomas Hardy
I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon's full gaze on me. -- Thomas Hardy
Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall - but what a wall! -- Thomas Hardy
When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines. -- Thomas Hardy
When sorrow ceases to be speculative sleep sees her opportunity. -- Thomas Hardy
She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope. -- Thomas Hardy
Separation ... though effectual with people of certain humors, is apt to idealize the removed object with others; notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. -- Thomas Hardy
Misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror. -- Thomas Hardy
My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella) -- Thomas Hardy
It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing. -- Thomas Hardy
Well, if you wanted to love me, why do you blow so hot and cold?
Why do you ... keep tantalizing me?
I tell you, Tess, I'd take you for a flirt,
For a sit you could catch,
If I didn't know just honest and pure you are. Angel -- Thomas Hardy
Who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been melted into it when in a liquid state, and could not now be unstuck ... -- Thomas Hardy
She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow. -- Thomas Hardy
Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life - a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. -- Thomas Hardy
Gabriel Oak: "It's time for you to fight your own battles... and win them too. -- Thomas Hardy
He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break. -- Thomas Hardy
You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always -- Thomas Hardy
This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock. -- Thomas Hardy
Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?'
'That's the very thing I say to myself,' said Gabriel. -- Thomas Hardy
And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be - and whenever I look up, there will be you.
-Gabriel Oak -- Thomas Hardy
Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life; -- Thomas Hardy
there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would had disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there -- Thomas Hardy
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length. -- Thomas Hardy
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own. -- Thomas Hardy
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given. -- Thomas Hardy
I always saw there was more to be learnt outside a book than in; and I took my steps accordingly, or I shouldn't have been the man I am. -- Thomas Hardy
There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness. -- Thomas Hardy
An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness -- Thomas Hardy
You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me. -- Thomas Hardy
Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. -- Thomas Hardy
Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits. -- Thomas Hardy
There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child. -- Thomas Hardy
Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. -- Thomas Hardy
There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behavior. When they want to be praised, which is often; when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom. -- Thomas Hardy
It being the first time in his life that he had touched female fingers under water, Dick duly registered the sensation as rather a nice one. -- Thomas Hardy
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all. -- Thomas Hardy
The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling. -- Thomas Hardy
He looked at the daylight shadows of a yellow hue, dancing with the firelight shadows in blue on the whitewashed chimney corner, but there was nothing in shadows. -- Thomas Hardy
Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones. -- Thomas Hardy
Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm. -- Thomas Hardy
I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand
As if to drink, into the brook,
And a faint figure seemed to stand
Above me, with the bygone look. -- Thomas Hardy
O, you have torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again! -- Thomas Hardy
And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. -- Thomas Hardy
Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe. -- Thomas Hardy
You temptress,Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon- I could not resist you as soon as I met you again. -- Thomas Hardy
Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale. -- Thomas Hardy
It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession -- Thomas Hardy
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on. -- Thomas Hardy
You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. -- Thomas Hardy
The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself. It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so. -- Thomas Hardy
She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct. -- Thomas Hardy
The stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the room. -- Thomas Hardy
Oh yes," she said, quickly. "I know all that. But don't talk of it - seven or six years - where may we all be by that time?" "They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short time to look back upon when they are past - much less than to look forward to now. -- Thomas Hardy
The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere. -- Thomas Hardy
Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale ... -- Thomas Hardy
She saw nothing of Winterborne during he days of her recovery: and perhaps on that account her fancy wove about him a more romantic tissue than it could have done if he had stood before her with all the specks and flaws inseparable from concrete humanity -- Thomas Hardy
What a fool she must have been ever to have had anything to do with the man! -- Thomas Hardy
The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how. -- Thomas Hardy
I want something that makes people strong and energetic for the present, that borrows the strength of to-morrow for use to-day - leaving to-morrow without any at all for that matter; or even that would take all life away to-morrow, so long as it enabled me to get home again now. -- Thomas Hardy
Mrs. d'Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond. -- Thomas Hardy
There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity - even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete. -- Thomas Hardy
It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her she was beautiful. -- Thomas Hardy
The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. -- Thomas Hardy
You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages. -- Thomas Hardy
That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times. -- Thomas Hardy
... the appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrane to his professional groove. -- Thomas Hardy
She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind. -- Thomas Hardy
If men only knew the staleness of the freshest of us! that nine times out of ten the "first love" they think they are winning from a woman is but the hulk of an old wrecked affection, fitted with new sails and re-used. -- Thomas Hardy
Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires. -- Thomas Hardy
To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience ... -- Thomas Hardy
Clare knew that she loved him - every curve of her form showed that - but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its single-mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaranteed, what honesty, what endurance, what good faith. -- Thomas Hardy
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized. -- Thomas Hardy
What woman, indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness? -- Thomas Hardy
The man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. -- Thomas Hardy
Half an hour afterwards Dick emerged from the inn, and if Fancy's lips had been real cherries, probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained. -- Thomas Hardy
She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath. -- Thomas Hardy
You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted! -- Thomas Hardy
He can blow the flute very well-that 'a can,' said a young married man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as 'Susan Tall's husband. -- Thomas Hardy
Alive enough to have strength to die -- Thomas Hardy
It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition. -- Thomas Hardy
A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman. -- Thomas Hardy
She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly. -- Thomas Hardy
Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own - then, -- Thomas Hardy
You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall hate you! -- Thomas Hardy
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you. -- Thomas Hardy
Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied sould of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way to say a little is often to tell more than to say. -- Thomas Hardy
When I want a broad-minded opinion for general enlightenment, distinct from special advice, I never go to a man who deals in the subject professionally. So I like the parson's opinion on law, the lawyer's on doctoring, the doctor's on business, and my business-man's ... on morals. -- Thomas Hardy
If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst. -- Thomas Hardy
It is never too late to break off a marriage that's distasteful to you. -- Thomas Hardy
But it was also obvious that man could not live by work alone; that the particular man Jude, at any rate, wanted something to love. -- Thomas Hardy
The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this. -- Thomas Hardy
Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable. -- Thomas Hardy
Sheer experience had already taught her that in some circumstances there was one thing better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever. -- Thomas Hardy
and when he awoke it was as if he had awakened in hell. It WAS hell - "the hell of conscious failure, -- Thomas Hardy
War makes rattling good history. -- Thomas Hardy
She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. -- Thomas Hardy
She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play -- Thomas Hardy
I hate to be what is called a clever girl
there are too many of that sort now! -- Thomas Hardy
the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man ... -- Thomas Hardy
Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable. -- Thomas Hardy
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man. -- Thomas Hardy
Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased, and laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft arm. -- Thomas Hardy
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel. -- Thomas Hardy
And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored. -- Thomas Hardy
We have missed because we tried to miss, I suppose. -- Thomas Hardy
Her suspense was terrible. -- Thomas Hardy
The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she only communed with her own heart concerning Troy. -- Thomas Hardy
I have danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile and many a long day. -- Thomas Hardy
There are considerations even before my consideration for you; reparations to be made-ties you know nothing of. If you repent of marrying, so do I. -- Thomas Hardy
Oak was just thinking that whatever he
himself might have suffered from Bathsheba's marriage, here was a
man who had suffered more, when Boldwood spoke in a changed
voice - that of one who yearned to make a confidence and relieve his
heart by an outpouring. -- Thomas Hardy
By making inquiries he found that the girl's name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day. -- Thomas Hardy
Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed! -- Thomas Hardy
But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are. -- Thomas Hardy
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory. -- Thomas Hardy
The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him. -- Thomas Hardy
The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more. -- Thomas Hardy
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change. -- Thomas Hardy
Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence. -- Thomas Hardy
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed. -- Thomas Hardy
The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him. -- Thomas Hardy
The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others. -- Thomas Hardy
I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about! -- Thomas Hardy
But time is short, and science is infinite... -- Thomas Hardy
He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then. -- Thomas Hardy
She heard footsteps brushing the grass, and had a consciousnesss that love was encircling her like a perfume. -- Thomas Hardy
To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind.
I would deceive her, And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind -- Thomas Hardy
What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes it's only one! -- Thomas Hardy
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king. -- Thomas Hardy
Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce disagreeable caricatures which spoil them. The -- Thomas Hardy
Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! ... She would have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more. -- Thomas Hardy
To be conscious that the end of a dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end. -- Thomas Hardy
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, 'Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin! -- Thomas Hardy
Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour. -- Thomas Hardy
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker. -- Thomas Hardy
So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to remain in obscurity. -- Thomas Hardy
With Sue as companion he could have renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should affect him disastrously. -- Thomas Hardy
Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty; -- Thomas Hardy
It was still early, and though the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet. There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane. -- Thomas Hardy
Here we suffer grief and pain, Here we meet to part again; In Heaven we part no more. -- Thomas Hardy
She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects. -- Thomas Hardy
But what is Wisdom really? A steady handling of any means to bring about any end necessary to happiness. Yet whether one's end be the usual end - a wealthy position in life - or no, the name of wisdom is seldom applied but to the means to that usual end. -- Thomas Hardy
He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears ... -- Thomas Hardy
... the more emphatic the renunciation, the less absolute its character. -- Thomas Hardy
I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman's moments. -- Thomas Hardy
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime! -- Thomas Hardy
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them. -- Thomas Hardy
Though the whole troop wore white garments, no two whites were alike amoung them. Some approached pure blanching, some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters (which has possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a cadavourous tint, and to a georgian style. -- Thomas Hardy
Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical time he did not answer: and they were again silent. -- Thomas Hardy
Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none. -- Thomas Hardy
Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can. -- Thomas Hardy
I have sometimes thought
that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know! -- Thomas Hardy
But I wish to be enlightened.'
'Let me caution you against it.'
'Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?'
'Yes, indeed.'
She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement. -- Thomas Hardy
Why, you make anyone think that loving is a thing that can be done and undone, and put on and put off at a mere whim. -- Thomas Hardy
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. -- Thomas Hardy
Though fervent was our vow,
Though ruddily ran our pleasure,
Bliss has fulfilled its measure,
And sees its sentence now.
Ache deep; but make no moans:
Smile out; but stilly suffer:
The paths of love are rougher
Than thoroughfares of stones. -- Thomas Hardy
Rays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts; -- Thomas Hardy
The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job. -- Thomas Hardy
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out
of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a
short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. -- Thomas Hardy
She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them. -- Thomas Hardy
How strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality. -- Thomas Hardy
He was conscious of a cold and sickly thrill throughout him; and all he reasoned was this, that the young creature whose graces had intoxicated him into making the most imprudent decision of his life, was less an angel than a women. -- Thomas Hardy
but though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play. -- Thomas Hardy
A novel is an impression, not an argument. -- Thomas Hardy
At these the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key and ticket, who,
regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed mutely to say: All
laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no
laughable thing under the sun. -- Thomas Hardy
Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and moods without attempting to pry into each other's history. -- Thomas Hardy
Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine. -- Thomas Hardy
He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of character; but, being without the power to combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless grooves through unheeding the comprehension. -- Thomas Hardy
But nobody did come, because nobody does: and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out if the world. -- Thomas Hardy
They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they. -- Thomas Hardy
Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would. -- Thomas Hardy
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible. -- Thomas Hardy
Yes,' he said; 'and not a dishonourable one. What held me back was just that one thing - a sense of morality that perhaps, madam, you did not give me credit for.' The latter words were spoken with a mien and tone of pride. -- Thomas Hardy
Uncork the cider ... Sabbath or no! -- Thomas Hardy
There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating. -- Thomas Hardy
Such poor liquor do make a man's throat feel very melancholy
and is a disgrace to the name of stimmilent. -- Thomas Hardy
I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die. -- Thomas Hardy
There is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. -- Thomas Hardy
Why didn't you tell me there was danger? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me! -- Thomas Hardy
But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one. -- Thomas Hardy
A man's body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained. -- Thomas Hardy
Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies. -- Thomas Hardy
To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road. -- Thomas Hardy
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in. -- Thomas Hardy
Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in. -- Thomas Hardy
For the present he was outside the gates of everything, colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside. Those palaces of light and leading; he might some day look down on the world through their panes. -- Thomas Hardy
Within his temples felt thoughts not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations. Thus, to his physical attractiveness was added the attractiveness of mental inaccessibility. -- Thomas Hardy
Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side. -- Thomas Hardy
There was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love -- Thomas Hardy
Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends ... -- Thomas Hardy
Though not fearful of measurable dangers, she feared the unknown. -- Thomas Hardy
Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? -- Thomas Hardy
I know you're there. I can smell your filthy cigars! -- Thomas Hardy
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society. -- Thomas Hardy
Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity -- Thomas Hardy
But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. -- Thomas Hardy
The position of guests, Tess being honoured with -- Thomas Hardy
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet. -- Thomas Hardy
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly -- Thomas Hardy
Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening. -- Thomas Hardy
The theologians,
the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed
statesmen, and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for
me by the grind of stern reality! -- Thomas Hardy
What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings, Love and its ecstasy, Will always have been great things, great things to me! -- Thomas Hardy
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. -- Thomas Hardy
A profile was visible against the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting both. -- Thomas Hardy
I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you," the farmer continued in an easier tone, "and put my rugged feeling into a graceful shape: but I have neither power nor patience to learn such things. -- Thomas Hardy
But since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly. -- Thomas Hardy
The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue. -- Thomas Hardy
You are nothing to me - nothing," said Troy, heartlessly. "A ceremony before a priest doesn't make a marriage. I am not morally yours. -- Thomas Hardy
Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of weathers, was a strange woman of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere: there might be some devilry about her presence. -- Thomas Hardy
Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. -- Thomas Hardy
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. -- Thomas Hardy
We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all. -- Thomas Hardy
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all. -- Thomas Hardy
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain. -- Thomas Hardy
Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself. -- Thomas Hardy
O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like an undulating billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the froth. -- Thomas Hardy
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. -- Thomas Hardy
There are two ways of getting rid of sorrows: one by living them down, the other by drowning them. The coachman drowned his. He informed her that her luggage -- Thomas Hardy
Because 'tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time 'tis convenient. -- Thomas Hardy
How did this remarkable reappearance effect itself when he was supposed by many to be at the bottom of the sea? -- Thomas Hardy
an indefinite courtship soon injures a woman's position and credit, sooner than you think.' 'Baptista, -- Thomas Hardy
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small. -- Thomas Hardy
Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants. -- Thomas Hardy
Behind him the hill are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. -- Thomas Hardy
He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent. -- Thomas Hardy
The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side. -- Thomas Hardy
I am only a peasant by position, not by nature! -- Thomas Hardy
She is one of those people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody knows her entirely. She -- Thomas Hardy
Close? ah, he is close! He can hold his tongue well. That man's dumbness is wonderful to listen to."
"There's so much sense in it. Every moment of it is brimmen over wi' sound understanding. -- Thomas Hardy
He had no wish to converse with her: that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough. -- Thomas Hardy
The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still. -- Thomas Hardy
Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy. -- Thomas Hardy
You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it. -- Thomas Hardy
Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it. -- Thomas Hardy
I've been troubled with weak moments lately, 'tis true. I've been drinky once this month already, and I did not go to church a-Sunday, and I dropped a curse or two yesterday; so I don't want to go too far for my safety. Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand." "I -- Thomas Hardy
A great statesman thinks several times, and acts; a young lady acts, and thinks several times. -- Thomas Hardy
To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country's history; -- Thomas Hardy
People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort. -- Thomas Hardy
Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play. -- Thomas Hardy
Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? -- Thomas Hardy
Hastily flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night was now clear. -- Thomas Hardy
The social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. -- Thomas Hardy
How unexpected [are] the attacks of destiny! -- Thomas Hardy
To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating. -- Thomas Hardy
Stockdale, a lonely young fellow, who had for weeks felt a great craving for somebody on whom to throw away superfluous interest, and even tenderness, was not sorry to join her ... -- Thomas Hardy
The sky was clear
remarkably clear
and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse. -- Thomas Hardy
Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light. -- Thomas Hardy
There's more for us to think about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the sky ... -- Thomas Hardy
Having begun to love you, I love you for ever - in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself. -- Thomas Hardy
She could have never believed in the morning that her colorless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope. -- Thomas Hardy
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown. -- Thomas Hardy
God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. -- Thomas Hardy
I can't bear that they, and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way! -- Thomas Hardy
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally. -- Thomas Hardy
Ideal conception, necessitated by ignorance of the person so imagined, often results in an incipient love, which otherwise would never have existed. -- Thomas Hardy
But what between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness! -- Thomas Hardy
If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later. -- Thomas Hardy
He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner: call on the husband to look at the wife: be eager to pay and intend to owe. -- Thomas Hardy
I am sorry to shock you," she said. "But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and thirty years. -- Thomas Hardy
December morning - sunny and exceedingly mild - might have regarded Gabriel -- Thomas Hardy
So do flux and reflux
the rhythm of change
alternate and persist in everything under the sky. -- Thomas Hardy
Tess was carried along the wings of the hours -- Thomas Hardy
Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else. -- Thomas Hardy
I don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough to fight her own battles, -- Thomas Hardy
Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. -- Thomas Hardy
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal. -- Thomas Hardy
Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct. -- Thomas Hardy
Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin. -- Thomas Hardy
As Antigone said, I am neither a dweller among men nor ghosts. -- Thomas Hardy
Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes/I see the motley, mocking fool's-cap rise. -- Thomas Hardy
Principles which could be subverted by feeling in one direction were liable to the same catastrophe in another. The -- Thomas Hardy
I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose. -- Thomas Hardy
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. The scales are balanced so nicely that a feather would turn them. -- Thomas Hardy
However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional! -- Thomas Hardy
The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands's and thousands'. -- Thomas Hardy
I am now about to enter on my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise. -- Thomas Hardy
She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. -- Thomas Hardy
What's right week days is right Sundays, -- Thomas Hardy
Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience: to him it was ever a surprise. -- Thomas Hardy
Done because we are too many. -- Thomas Hardy
It troubled her much to see what a great flame a little wildfire was likely to kindle. -- Thomas Hardy
Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being. -- Thomas Hardy
Why do you ... keep tantalizing me?
I tell you, Tess, I'd take you for a flirt,
For a sit you could catch,
If I didn't know just honest and pure you are. -- Thomas Hardy
For unfortunately the person most dogged in the belief in a false reputation is always that one, the possessor, who has the best means of knowing that it is not true. -- Thomas Hardy
But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one. -- Thomas Hardy
There was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. -- Thomas Hardy
Very well, said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. -- Thomas Hardy
And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. -- Thomas Hardy
An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The -- Thomas Hardy
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger. -- Thomas Hardy
If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways - not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways. -- Thomas Hardy
shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all." (All.) -- Thomas Hardy
Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture. -- Thomas Hardy
Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society - of "pleasure girded about with pain." After that the blackness of unutterable night. -- Thomas Hardy
...what only hurts me now would torture and kill me then! -- Thomas Hardy
And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong. -- Thomas Hardy
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet -- Thomas Hardy
Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds -- Thomas Hardy
She is lazy and dissatisfied. But that is not all of it. Supposing her to be as good a woman as any you can find, which she certainly is not, why do you wish to connect yourself with anybody at present? -- Thomas Hardy
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones") -- Thomas Hardy
he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice, -- Thomas Hardy
And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape. -- Thomas Hardy
Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting. -- Thomas Hardy
Are you in want of anything?" he said gently. "No, sir," she replied. "We are fairly well provided for. -- Thomas Hardy
Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast. -- Thomas Hardy
There was a certain scientific practicability even in his love-making, and it here came out excellently. -- Thomas Hardy
The real sin ma'am, in my mind lies in thinking of ever wedding with a man you don't love honest and true. -- Thomas Hardy
Tell him everything; it is best. He will forgive you. -- Thomas Hardy
But she remained more or less and ideal character, about whose form he began to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams. -- Thomas Hardy
Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. -- Thomas Hardy
A cloud that has gathered over us; though 'we have wronged no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no man!' Though perhaps we have 'done that which was right in our own eyes. -- Thomas Hardy
He'd seen a man look a fool a good many times, but never such a fool as that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had been played upon ... -- Thomas Hardy
Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man
observing people listening to music. You say 'What are they
regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is. -- Thomas Hardy
Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one ... -- Thomas Hardy
He is a sort of steady man in a wild way, you know. That's better than to be as some are, wild in a steady way. I am afraid that's how I am. -- Thomas Hardy
The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humourousness. -- Thomas Hardy
The 'appetite for joy' which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the ride sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric -- Thomas Hardy
Judge me by my future works. -- Thomas Hardy
There was no wind, in a human sense; but a steady stertorous breathing from the fir-trees showed that, now as always, there was movement in apparent stagnation. -- Thomas Hardy
You dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom
hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air! -- Thomas Hardy
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years. -- Thomas Hardy
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. -- Thomas Hardy
The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!'
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why? -- Thomas Hardy
The truth is, that I never care much for reading what one ought to read; I wish I did, but I cannot help it. And, -- Thomas Hardy
Is it that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress? -- Thomas Hardy
Her back seemed to be endowed with a sensitiveness to occular beams ... -- Thomas Hardy
Tis my belief she's a very good woman at bottom."
"She's terrible deep, then. -- Thomas Hardy
Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light. -- Thomas Hardy
I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know. -- Thomas Hardy
He walked from one window to another and became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company. -- Thomas Hardy
But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet. -- Thomas Hardy
She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. -- Thomas Hardy
The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood. -- Thomas Hardy
His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations. -- Thomas Hardy
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure. -- Thomas Hardy
The roof was a gymnasium for the winds -- Thomas Hardy
It was quite impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when your heart's desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven. -- Thomas Hardy
Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet! -- Thomas Hardy
Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks ... -- Thomas Hardy
He's the man we were in search of, that's true, and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted. -- Thomas Hardy
Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all! -- Thomas Hardy
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him. -- Thomas Hardy
People who have always gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong. -- Thomas Hardy
The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus - the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great. -- Thomas Hardy
A little stimulated at not finding her ready and waiting - so fanciful are men! - he hastened on... -- Thomas Hardy
He resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady flow of this man's life. -- Thomas Hardy
She showed a natural aptitude for little domestic refinements, so far as related to things and manners; but in what is called culture she -- Thomas Hardy
For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. -- Thomas Hardy
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed. -- Thomas Hardy
Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness. -- Thomas Hardy
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don't you think so? -- Thomas Hardy
Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary. -- Thomas Hardy
Women are never tired of bewailing man's fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy. -- Thomas Hardy
The negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative -- Thomas Hardy
That the party was intended to be a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt. -- Thomas Hardy
When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think. -- Thomas Hardy
old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern -- Thomas Hardy
A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown. -- Thomas Hardy
Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in "Athalie"; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola. -- Thomas Hardy
That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity! -- Thomas Hardy
But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is. -- Thomas Hardy
So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were not made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything; nothing is made for man. -- Thomas Hardy
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes. -- Thomas Hardy
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons. -- Thomas Hardy
She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were cast -- Thomas Hardy
Hate him she did not quite; but he was dust and ashes to her... -- Thomas Hardy
Thought failed him, and he returned to realities. -- Thomas Hardy
Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand. -- Thomas Hardy
in the month-by-month process of editorial criticism and censorship, Hardy never lost his fierce contempt for all forms of 'tampering with natural truth -- Thomas Hardy
The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all. -- Thomas Hardy
( ... ) so that I could only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine. -- Thomas Hardy
I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these? - Job xii. 3. -- Thomas Hardy
In about the time a person unaccustomed to bodily labour would have decided upon which side to lie, Farmer Oak was asleep. The -- Thomas Hardy
A headstrong maid, that she is-and won't listen to no advice at all. Pride and vanity have ruined many a cobbler's dog. -- Thomas Hardy
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know. -- Thomas Hardy
I have seen your mother; and I will never see her again! -- Thomas Hardy
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity. -- Thomas Hardy
Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet - a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness. -- Thomas Hardy
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more. -- Thomas Hardy
I forgot the defective can be more than the whole -- Thomas Hardy
To keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise. -- Thomas Hardy
Some folk want their luck buttered. -- Thomas Hardy
Five years, nine months, and a few days. Fifteen months nearly have passed since he vanished, and is there anything so wonderful in an engagement of little more than five years? -- Thomas Hardy
I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all. -- Thomas Hardy
Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure. -- Thomas Hardy
Learn something about everything,
And everything about something. -- Thomas Hardy
...you have torn my life all to pieces.. made me a victim, a caged bird! -- Thomas Hardy
Many ... have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. -- Thomas Hardy
He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine. -- Thomas Hardy
I determined you should come; and you have come! I have shown my power. -- Thomas Hardy
her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun. -- Thomas Hardy
Well -- I'm an outsider to the end of my days! -- Thomas Hardy
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close? -- Thomas Hardy
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle. -- Thomas Hardy
Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter? -- Thomas Hardy
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it. -- Thomas Hardy
I think astronomy is a bad study for you. It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly. -- Thomas Hardy
Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn. -- Thomas Hardy
Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail ... -- Thomas Hardy
His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness. -- Thomas Hardy
I wish I had never been born
there or anywhere else. -- Thomas Hardy
O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always. -- Thomas Hardy
Matter is matter, and mental association only a delusion. -- Thomas Hardy
I may do some good before I am dead
be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story. -- Thomas Hardy
Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations. -- Thomas Hardy
Why did Troy not leave my treasure alone? -- Thomas Hardy
Her face too was fresh in colour, but it was of a totally different quality - soft and evanescent, like the light under a heap of rose-petals. -- Thomas Hardy
It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one. -- Thomas Hardy
I like reading and all that, but a crave to get back tot he life of my infancy and all its freedom. (Sue Bridehead) -- Thomas Hardy
The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not adopting it. -- Thomas Hardy
How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them? -- Thomas Hardy
Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one -- Thomas Hardy
The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man. This -- Thomas Hardy
You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. -- Thomas Hardy
Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. -- Thomas Hardy
Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences. -- Thomas Hardy
So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope ... -- Thomas Hardy
All romances end at marriage. -- Thomas Hardy
And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath. -- Thomas Hardy
Three Leahs to get to One Rachel. -- Thomas Hardy
Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so. -- Thomas Hardy
Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike. -- Thomas Hardy
He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon. -- Thomas Hardy
One's pretty lively when ruined. -- Thomas Hardy
Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then. -- Thomas Hardy
It is difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to all! -- Thomas Hardy
If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do. -- Thomas Hardy
A man's silence is wonderful to listen to. -- Thomas Hardy
In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked that she was, and forgot that the defective can more than the entire. -- Thomas Hardy
The clock struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. -- Thomas Hardy
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises. -- Thomas Hardy
It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin. -- Thomas Hardy
By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed its temperature. -- Thomas Hardy
That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units. -- Thomas Hardy
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. -- Thomas Hardy
She moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness. -- Thomas Hardy
At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. -- Thomas Hardy
And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. -- Thomas Hardy
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity. -- Thomas Hardy
Once victim, always victim-that's the law. -- Thomas Hardy
But no one came. Because no one ever does. -- Thomas Hardy
Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line - less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all. -- Thomas Hardy
These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. -- Thomas Hardy
She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as clearly as he could state his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her father had none. -- Thomas Hardy
You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness. -- Thomas Hardy
The sun shone into her mouth as into a tulip, and lent it a similar scarlet fire. -- Thomas Hardy
Always wanting another man than your own. -- Thomas Hardy
Our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes -- Thomas Hardy
( ... ) he turned to go his own way, and hardly knew he loved her still. -- Thomas Hardy
The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment. -- Thomas Hardy
Bless thy simplicity, Tess -- Thomas Hardy
Experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. -- Thomas Hardy
Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store? -- Thomas Hardy
One thing he certainly was - sincere. -- Thomas Hardy
Let there be truth at last,/ Even if despair. -- Thomas Hardy
You could see the skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton. -- Thomas Hardy
If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now! -- Thomas Hardy
And if you hear a frog jump into the pond with a flounce like a stone thrown in, be sure you run and tell me, because it is a sign of rain. -- Thomas Hardy
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess? -- Thomas Hardy
Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die? -- Thomas Hardy
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years. -- Thomas Hardy
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. -- Thomas Hardy
Some folks want their luck buttered. -- Thomas Hardy
No, I am not a lady,' she said sadly. 'I never shall be. But he's a gentleman, and that - makes it - O how difficult for me! -- Thomas Hardy
and yet to every bad, there is a worse -- Thomas Hardy
He waited day after day, saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting. -- Thomas Hardy
Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it." "You are very philosophical. 'A negation' is profound talking. -- Thomas Hardy
Two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience -- Thomas Hardy
Her presence had not so much weight as to task thought, and yet enough to exercise it. -- Thomas Hardy
Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight. -- Thomas Hardy
Don't that make your bosom plim? -- Thomas Hardy
But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose -- Thomas Hardy
Perhaps to know her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion. -- Thomas Hardy
Women accept their destiny more readily than men. -- Thomas Hardy
I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability. -- Thomas Hardy
But it is without a doubt a misfortune for a man who has a living to get, to be born of a truly noble nature. A high soul will bring a man to the workhouse ... A Pair of Blue Eyes -- Thomas Hardy