Quotes from Thomas Hardy

there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would had disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there

Behind him the hill are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless.

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it, Tess? murmured Abraham through his tears.

There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel's.

Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.

Don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine. Cultivate the art of renunciation.

The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side.

Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.

You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall hate you!

I shall do one thing in this life – one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.

On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed....the taper was interrupted..and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.

and to his eyes, casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches, with their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-creviced elm all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like the flapping of wings.

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think.

The roof was a gymnasium for the winds

Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come within.

I am now about to enter on my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise.

Feeling had indeed smothered judgment that day.

And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.

She is one of those people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody knows her entirely.  She

I have been thinking, she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, that 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.

How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them?

The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus—the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few—mainly the younger ones—rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield's habit, her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation.