Quotes from Thomas Hardy

I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn't keep on thinking they'd be all withered in a few days!

though the whole troop wore white garments, no two whites were alike amoung them. Some approached pure blanching, some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters (which has possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a cadavourous tint, and to a georgian style.

Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of weathers, was a strange woman of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere: there might be some devilry about her presence.

We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks while a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek.

He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated: 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, by the influence of a wife and family.

But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines.

He read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.

The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.

Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm.

the appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrane to his professional groove.

A Thunderstorm In Town She wore a 'terra-cotta' dress, And we stayed, because of the pelting storm, Within the hansom's dry recess, Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless We sat on, snug and warm. Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain, And the glass that had screened our forms before Flew up, and out she sprang to her door: I should have kissed her if the rain Had lasted a minute more.

He walked from one window to another and became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company.

Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting.

He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had lost all he possessed of worldly property; he had sunk from his modest elevation down to a lower ditch than that from which he had started; but he had now a dignified calm he had never known before and that indifference to fate. And thus the abasement had been an exaltation and the loss gain.

The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from crown to toe.

She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

I want something that makes people strong and energetic for the present, that borrows the strength of to-morrow for use to-day—leaving to-morrow without any at all for that matter; or even that would take all life away to-morrow, so long as it enabled me to get home again now.

reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease...

Hastily flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night was now clear.

Our moods meet in the wrong places.

If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later.

Jude waited at all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the intelligence was bought to him that a child had been prematurely born, and that it, like the others, was a corpse.

Her suspense was terrible.

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way, to say a little is often to tell more than to say a great deal.