Quotes from Thomas Hardy

Her back seemed to be endowed with a sensitiveness to occular beams...

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. My

She was carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her - an enviable result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism.

She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries . . . Assuming that the souls of men and women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia's soul to be flame-like.

There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behaviour. When they want to be praised, which is often, when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom.

Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.

Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.

Why do you... keep tantalizing me? I tell you, Tess, I'd take you for a flirt, For a sit you could catch, If I didn't know just honest and pure you are.

Well, if you wanted to love me, why do you blow so hot and cold? Why do you... keep tantalizing me? I tell you, Tess, I'd take you for a flirt, For a sit you could catch, If I didn't know just honest and pure you are. Angel

Get away, Maryann, or go on with your scrubbing, or do something! You ought to be married by this time, and not here troubling me! Ay, mistress—so I did. But what between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!

All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale

Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness.

her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.

Durbeyfield was what was locally called a slack-twisted fellow; he had good strength to work at times; but the times could not be relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement; and, having been unaccustomed to the regular toil of the day-labourer, he was not particularly persistent when they did so coincide.

We are acting by the letter; and 'the letter killeth.

Your worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit rather than to your blame. Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.

Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

Learn something about everything, And everything about something.

And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles.

What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become, she must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime!

That's a handsome maid, he said to Oak. But she has her faults, said Gabriel. True, farmer. And the greatest of them is—well, what it is always. Beating people down? ay, 'tis so. O no. What, then? Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller's indifference, glanced back to where he had witnessed her performance over the hedge, and said, Vanity.

the more emphatic the renunciation, the less absolute its character.

It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.