Quotes from Thomas Hardy

For the present he was outside the gates of everything, colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside. Those palaces of light and leading; he might some day look down on the world through their panes.

Women were different from men in such matters. Was it that they were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less romantic ; or were they more heroic?

What are my books but one plea against man's inhumanity to man --to woman-- and to the lower animals?

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society - of pleasure girded about with pain. After that the blackness of unutterable night.

He was conscious of a cold and sickly thrill throughout him; and all he reasoned was this, that the young creature whose graces had intoxicated him into making the most imprudent decision of his life, was less an angel than a women.

love, life and everything human seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe'. (p.309)

To keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise.

For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

It being the first time in his life that he had touched female fingers under water, Dick duly registered the sensation as rather a nice one.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more.

She dismissed the past – trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.

And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong.

She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as clearly as he could state his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her father had none.

This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly

Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real.

A great statesman thinks several times, and acts; a young lady acts, and thinks several times.

Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.

Let there be truth at last,/ Even if despair.

All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.

Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.

Within his temples felt thoughts not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations. Thus, to his physical attractiveness was added the attractiveness of mental inaccessibility.

Cultivate the art of renunciation.

An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The