Quotes from Thomas Hardy

But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

All things merge in one another - good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics...

I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!

I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!

Stupors, however, do not last forever

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...

The stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the room.

It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by;

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

I think of people more kindly when I am away from them.

But nobody did come, because nobody does: and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out if the world.

Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said?

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.

When the love-led man had ceased from his labours Bathsheba came and looked him in the face. 'Gabriel, will you you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon. 'I will,' said Gabriel. And she smiled on him again.

I shan't forget you, Jude,' he said, smiling, as the cart moved off. 'Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.

But what between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!

there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.

The pale lunar touches which make beauties of hags lent divinity to this face, already beautiful.

The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.

Having begun to love you, I love you for ever - in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself.

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?