Quotes from Thomas Hardy

He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation. Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle irreverence, called his demi-gods, would have shunned such encounters if they doubted their own strength. But he could not. He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing.

Mrs. d'Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.

I object to that conversation! interposed the old woman. I was not capable enough to hear what I said, and what is said out of my hearing is not evidence.

No; the charm is worked by common sense, and the spell can only be broke by your acting stupidly.

And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally.

A man who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing his course.

Your eyes are to be my stars for the future.

Why - what the name - began her father. I thought you went out to get the parsley!

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

Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!

I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, 'Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!

Time enough to cry when you know 'tis a crying matter; 'tis bad to meet troubles half-way.

Separation…though effectual with people of certain humors, is apt to idealize the removed object with others; notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long.

And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman's most marked characteristic.

I have been thinking that the social moulds civilisation fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies....

Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!

There is a certain degree and tone of light which tends to disturb the equilibrium of the senses, and to promote dangerously the tenderer moods; added to movement, it drives the emotions to rankness, the reason becoming sleepy and unperceiving in inverse proportion; and this light fell now upon these two from the disc of the moon. All the dancing girls felt the symptoms, but Eustacia most of all.

Ah, fool, he went on to himself, to clip your own wings when you were free to soar! . . . But I could not rest till I had done it. Why do I never recognise an opportunity till I have missed it, nor the good or ill of a step till it is irrevocable? . . . I fell in love!

He admired her so much that he used to light the candle three times a night to look at her.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single, we do.

Limitation of the capacity is never recognized as a loss by the loser therefrom.

The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility.

Not mentally. But I haven't the courage of my views, as I said before. I didn't marry him altogether because of the scandal. But sometimes a woman's LOVE OF BEING LOVED gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.