Quotes from Thomas Hardy

It troubled her much to see what a great flame a little wildfire was likely to kindle.

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.

I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you, the farmer continued in an easier tone, and put my rugged feeling into a graceful shape: but I have neither power nor patience to learn such things.

Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one....

Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Edgon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex Europaeus--which will act as a sort of hairbrush--she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time.

Tell him everything; it is best. He will forgive you.

Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!

The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.

He looked at the daylight shadows of a yellow hue, dancing with the firelight shadows in blue on the whitewashed chimney corner, but there was nothing in shadows.

A little stimulated at not finding her ready and waiting - so fanciful are men! - he hastened on...

Nature does not often say 'See?' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game.

I was court-martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Ideal conception, necessitated by ignorance of the person so imagined, often results in an incipient love, which otherwise would never have existed.

I looked up from my writing, And gave a start to see, As if rapt in my inditing, The moon's full gaze on me.

the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.

what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst of me. I am in a chaos of principles--groping in the dark--acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best.

they washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water. Which are my fingers and which are yours? he said, looking up. They are very much mixed. They are all yours, said she, very prettily

The clock struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts.

The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.

One's pretty lively when ruined.

Two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience

I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bygone look.

It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.