Quotes About Thomas Hardy

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

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." • THOMAS HARDY, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

Michael Palin : I am sorry to interrupt you there Dennis, but he's crossed it out. Thomas Hardy here on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far and he is gazing off into space. Ohh! Oh dear he's signed his name again. Graham Chapman: It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again. - Matching Tie and Handkerchief, Novel Writing

Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.

the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man...

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

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

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

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.

Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!

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.

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

She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were cast

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.

I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!

The stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the room.

Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said?

The pale lunar touches which make beauties of hags lent divinity to this face, already beautiful.

It was quite impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when your heart's desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven.

Tis my belief she's a very good woman at bottom." "She's terrible deep, then.