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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
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I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
Thomas Hardy
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That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity!
Thomas Hardy
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Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.
Thomas Hardy
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
Thomas Hardy
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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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There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.
Thomas Hardy
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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
Thomas Hardy
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What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?" "Yes, dearest," he said. "They have come." "It is as it should be," she murmured. "Angel, I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!" She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved. "I am ready," she said quietly.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
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
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The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.
Thomas Hardy
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George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.
Thomas Hardy
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Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?
Thomas Hardy
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...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.
Thomas Hardy
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
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All romances end at marriage.
Thomas Hardy
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In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. 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?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game.
Thomas Hardy
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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
