Quotes from Thomas Hardy

Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience...

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?

We have missed because we tried to miss, I suppose.

I can't bear that they,and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way!It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!

Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will live on a long time after nutriment has ceased

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.

But it was also obvious that man could not live by work alone; that the particular man Jude, at any rate, wanted something to love.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

but though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play.

How people will talk about one's doings!" Fancy exclaimed. "Well, if you make songs about yourself, my dear, you can't blame other people for singing 'em.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.

She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part—vistas of probable triumphs—the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won.

Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! … She would have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more.

The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humourousness.

I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly.

How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn't you tell me there was danger? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way, and you did not help me!

They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

Very well," said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever.

A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.

Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with trouble

If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.