Quotes from Thomas Hardy

He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

Wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions

The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

The best fiction is truer than history

But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by the average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.

You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons.

Yes- I must own it- I am bright-tonight: cheerful and more than cheerful- so much so that I am almost sad again with the sense that all of it passing away. And sometimes, when I am excessively hopeful and blithe , a trouble is looming in the distance: so that I often get to look upon gloom in me with content, and to fear a happy mood. Still this maybe be absurd- I feel that it is absurd. Perhaps my day is dawning at last

Und da sie genötigt war, sich selbst zu den Glücklichen zu zählen, hörte sie nicht auf, über den Fortbestand des Unvorhergesehenen zu staunen, wo diejenige, der solche ungebrochene Heiterkeit im Erwachsenenstadium zuteil wurde, sie selbst war, deren Jugend sie gelehrt zu haben schien, daß Glück nur eine zufällige Episode in dem allgemeinen Drama menschlicher Pein war.

wan starlight...

How Great My Grief How great my grief, my joys how few, Since first it was my fate to know thee! —Have the slow years not brought to view How great my grief, my joys how few, Nor memory shaped old times anew, Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee How great my grief, my joys how few, Since first it was my fate to know thee?

For a marriage would be very nice in one sense. People would talk about me, and think I had won my battle, and I should feel triumphant, and all that, But a husband-- Well! Why, he'd always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there he'd be. Of course he would--I, that is. Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can't show off in that way by herself, I shan't marry--at least yet.

far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees...

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change in government. . . .

O, if any man wants to make himself immortal by painting a picture of wretchedness, let him come here!

She had not meant him to translate her words about returning home so literally at the first; she had not intended him to learn her secret; but more than all she was not able to endure the perception of his learning it and continuing unmoved.

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artisans, drunkards, and paupers, she said, perverse still at his differing from her. They see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons.

Her supreme indifference added fuel to Manston's ardour - it completely disarmed his pride. The invulnerable Nobody seemed greater to him than a susceptible Princess.

as Milton's Satan first saw Paradise.

She thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and godlike was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.

They say that a time comes when men laugh at misery through long acquaintance with it.

Tess comprese che malgrado i lunghi mesi di segreti pentimenti, di lotte, di autoraccomandazioni, di programmi per un futuro vissuto in solitudine, il consiglio dell'amore avrebbe vinto.

Qui soffriamo dolore e pena qui c'incontriamo per separarci ancora; solo in cielo non ci divideremo più