Quotes from Thomas Hardy

And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Close? ah, he is close! He can hold his tongue well. That man's dumbness is wonderful to listen to." "There's so much sense in it. Every moment of it is brimmen over wi' sound understanding.

The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I don't like to see the rooks and starlings in the fields, because I grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me. I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you my own dear! Come to me - come to me, and save me from what threatens me! - Your faithful heartbroken

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. The scales are balanced so nicely that a feather would turn them.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman's part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba's position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off.

I am sorry to shock you, she said. But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and thirty years.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative

Perhaps in no minor point does a woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false – except indeed in that of being utterly skeptical on strictures that she knows to be true.

What's right week days is right Sundays

She could have never believed in the morning that her colorless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope.

The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.

I know you're there. I can smell your filthy cigars!

He can blow the flute very well-that 'a can,' said a young married man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as 'Susan Tall's husband.

She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to previous ones.Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and by this time every couple had been suitably matched. It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own—then

The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.

Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak's feelings were as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances.

She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind.

Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light.

Dairyman Crick's household of maids and man lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which needliness ends, and below the line at which the 'convenances' begin to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough

Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes/I see the motley, mocking fool's-cap rise.

By making inquiries he found that the girl's name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day.