Quotes from Thomas Hardy

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.

I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman's moments.

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity

What is it, Angel? she said, starting up. Have they come for me? Yes, dearest, he said. They have come. It is as it should be, she murmured. Angel, I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me! She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved. I am ready, she said quietly.

But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.

I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.

Some folks want their luck buttered.

He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy! continued Arabella. See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.

George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.