Thomas Hardy Quotes
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But no one came. Because no one ever does.
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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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Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
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To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.
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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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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
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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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But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
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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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Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
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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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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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You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
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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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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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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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...Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!' 'For how long?' 'O - ever so long. Days and days.' 'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!' 'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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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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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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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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It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.