Quotes from Thomas Hardy

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.

So may I live no junctive law fulfilling, And my heart's table bear no woman's name.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

The fundamental error of their matrimonial union that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling.

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

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

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Why didn't you tell me there was danger? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me!

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted." "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one.

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

But no one came. Because no one ever does.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

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.

our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.