Quotes from Thomas Hardy

Reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease, and expectation in its only comfortable form--that of absolute faith--is practically an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.

You could see the skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton.

Perhaps you are making a cat's paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems so--to see you sitting up there so prim.

Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.

Is it that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress?

it is difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to all!

In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.

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?

Life with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you--I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there's never any knowing what a man med do-- you'll have the sticks o' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief.

The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn' was just sufficient to reveal to them the melancholy red leaves, lying thickly in the channels by the roadside, ever and anon loudly tapped on by heavy drops of water, which the boughs above had collected from the foggy air.

With Sue as companion he could have renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should affect him disastrously.

and when he awoke it was as if he had awakened in hell. It WAS hell—the hell of conscious failure

The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line.

The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!' And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?

If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous tension which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied to his virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about his mouth like those in the Laocoön, and corrugations between his brows.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere.

Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it.

and she had altogether the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline, an under–brightness shining through from the depths which that discipline had not yet been able to reach.

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.

People say I must be cold–natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self–contained in their daily lives.

I determined you should come; and you have come! I have shown my power.

There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity—even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete.

Perhaps to know her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion.