Thomas Hardy Quotes
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That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.
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War makes rattling good history.
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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.
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If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
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She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
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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.
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Some folk want their luck buttered.
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There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
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We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
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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.
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My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
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You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!
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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
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Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
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The defective can be more than the entire.
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Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
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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.
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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.
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Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain. She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.
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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
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But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
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You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
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A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.