Thomas Hardy Quotes
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You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
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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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How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!
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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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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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There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
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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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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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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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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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A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
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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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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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But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
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Some folk want their luck buttered.
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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 of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.
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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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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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A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
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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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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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The defective can be more than the entire.