Thomas Hardy Quotes
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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
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Some folk want their luck buttered.
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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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The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
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Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
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Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
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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.
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The defective can be more than the entire.
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A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
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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.
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We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
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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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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.