Quotes from Thomas Hardy

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?' 'That's the very thing I say to myself,' said Gabriel.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

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

By experience, says Roger Ascham, we find out a short way by a long wandering. Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

I don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough to fight her own battles

The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself. It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play

So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were not made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything; nothing is made for man.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

I don't--know about ghosts, but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive... A very easy way to feel 'em go is to lie on the grass at night, and look straight up at some big bright star; and by fixing your mind upon it you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at all.

you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.

I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will.

O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always.

Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.

I hate to be what is called a clever girl--there are too many of that sort now!

Good, better, best Never let it rest, Till ur good is better And better is best.

Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.

Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.