Quotes from Thomas Hardy

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was a very good reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz - as she herself had felt two or three years ago - my soul chooseth strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe it ; I would not live always.

He [Mr. Melbury] knew that a woman once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first time he asked himself why this so generally should be done.

Then a morsel of snow flew across the river towards the fifth window. It smacked against the wall at a point several yards from its mark. The throw was the idea of a man conjoined with the execution of a woman. No man who had ever seen bird, rabbit, or squirrel in his childhood, could possibly have thrown with such utter imbecility as was shown here.

Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things!

for she had penetrated Troy's nature so far as to estimate his tendencies pretty accurately, but unfortunately loved him no less in thinking that he might soon cease to love her—indeed, considerably more.

Was Bathsheba altogether blind to the obvious fact that the support of a lover's arms is not of a kind best calculated to assist a resolve to renounce him? Or was she sophistically sensible, with a thrill of pleasure, that by adopting this course for getting rid of him she was ensuring a meeting with him, at any rate, once more?

promise that. I shall have no bailiff; I shall continue to be my own manager, she said decisively. Very well, then; you should be thankful to me for biding. How would the farm go on with nobody to mind it but a woman?

she, like all others, had moments of commonplace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered

The rambler who for old association's sake should trace the forsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from Bristol to the south shore of England, would find himself during the latter half of his journey, in the vicinity of some extensive woodlands, interspersed with apple orchards.

Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly enough, what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would have to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on him.

Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged in regular equation.

But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life—music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world? That was the shape of my youthful dream; but I did not get it.

But these shaggy recesses were at all seasons a familiar surrounding to Olly and Mrs. Yeobright; and the addition of darkness lends no frightfulness to the face of a friend.

The real Doctor Fitzpiers was a man of too many hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in the profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide practice in the rural district he had marked out as his field of survey for the present.

What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in her mind which had led to her presence here. There was a spasmodic abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound, the woman's brain had authorized what it could not regulate.

The regular resource of people who don't go enough into the world to live a novel is to write one. –

Any woman who has ever tried will know without explanation what an unpalatable task it is to dismiss, even when she does not love him, a man who has all the natural and moral qualities she would desire, and only fails in the social. Would-be lovers are not so numerous, even with the best women, that the sacrifice of one can be felt as other than a good thing wasted, in a world where there are few good things.

Láska je potenciální síla ve skute?né slabosti.

Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied that his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace...

The facility with which even the most timid women sometimes acquire a relish for the dreadful when that is amalgamated with a little triumph, is marvellous.

Yet Farmer Boldwood, whether by nature kind or the reverse to kind, did not exercise kindness, here. The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.

rara vez el hombre digno de ser amado coincide con la hora de amar. Raramente dice la naturaleza «¡Mira!» al pobre ser humano en el instante en que hacerlo así puede conducirle a la felicidad; y pocas veces responde «Aquí» al grito de «¿Dónde?», hasta que ese juego del escondite degenera en un pasatiempo pesado y tedioso.

Women are never tired of bewailing man's fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy.

Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature, picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule, broadcast, it was all three. Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience: to him it was ever a surprise.