Thomas Hardy Quotes
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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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Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
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My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella)
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A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
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The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
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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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People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
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Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.
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The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")
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It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
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...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.
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Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.
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You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
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O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
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Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
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When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.
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You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
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But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
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Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
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I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.
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In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.