Quotes from Thomas Hardy

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.

You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don't you think so?

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

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

Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.

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

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.