Thomas Hardy Quotes
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But no one came. Because no one ever does.
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The defective can be more than the entire.
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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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Some folk want their luck buttered.
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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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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
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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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You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
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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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War makes rattling good history.
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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.
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A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
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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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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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That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
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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.