Thomas Hardy Quotes
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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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The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
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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.
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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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You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
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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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Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one.
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Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.
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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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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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It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
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I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
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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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So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.
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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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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
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Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
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Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.
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- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
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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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This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.