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It was that period in the vernal quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the season. The vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts.
Thomas Hardy -
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
Thomas Hardy
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I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
Thomas Hardy -
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.
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 -
That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity!
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 -
Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Thomas Hardy
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That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.
Thomas Hardy -
He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.
Thomas Hardy -
...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.
Thomas Hardy -
Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?
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 -
The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Thomas Hardy
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Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted." "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one.
Thomas Hardy -
...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
Thomas Hardy -
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
Thomas Hardy -
She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
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 -
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
Thomas Hardy
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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 -
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 -
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
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