Quotes from Thomas Hardy

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations.

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child.

To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind. I would deceive her, And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind

At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.

It was a fatal omission of Boldwood's that he had never once told her she was beautiful.

Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall—but what a wall!

My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella)

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.

Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always

Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one

How strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.

For the love of men like Fitzpiers is unquestionably of such quality as to bear division and transference. He had indeed once declared, though not to her, that on one occasion he had noticed himself to be possessed by five distinct infatuations at the same time. If this were true, his differed from the highest affection as the lower orders of the animal world differ from advanced organisms, partition causing not death but a multiplied existence.

Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

Three Leahs to get to One Rachel.

Thought failed him, and he returned to realities.

People who have always gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong.

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.

To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating.