Quotes from Thomas Hardy

These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed.

Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires.

When sorrow ceases to be speculative sleep sees her opportunity.

There was a certain scientific practicability even in his love-making, and it here came out excellently. 

there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.

That the party was intended to be a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt.

After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them;

Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast.

Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then.

A headstrong maid, that she is-and won't listen to no advice at all. Pride and vanity have ruined many a cobbler's dog.

She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.

They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them.

thence to the fruit-garden and greenhouses, where he asked her if she liked strawberries. Yes, said Tess, when they come.

Boldwood, whose unreasoning devotion to Bathsheba could only be characterized as a fond madness which neither time nor circumstance, evil nor good report, could weaken or destroy. This fevered hope had grown up again like a grain of mustard-seed during the quiet which followed the hasty conjecture that Troy was drowned. He nourished it fearfully, and almost shunned the contemplation of it in earnest, lest facts should reveal the wildness of the dream. Bathsheba having at last been persuaded

To adorn her in somebody else's eyes; never again in mine.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.

Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does it good.

her presence had not so much weight as to task thought, and yet enough to exercise it.

Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!

She is a bold and passionate woman, fighting to earn respect as a farm owner and over the course of the novel she has to endure much suffering, which enhances her better qualities while diminishing some elements of her less admirable traits.

The truth is, that I never care much for reading what one ought to read; I wish I did, but I cannot help it.  And

At these the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed mutely to say: All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.

As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray.

he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice