Quotes About Thomas Hardy

To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country's history;

but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humourousness.

December morning—sunny and exceedingly mild—might have regarded Gabriel

Don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine. Cultivate the art of renunciation.

The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus—the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few—mainly the younger ones—rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield's habit, her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation.

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society - of pleasure girded about with pain. After that the blackness of unutterable night.

Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.

She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind.

Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed!

This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.

The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!' And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?

If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous tension which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied to his virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about his mouth like those in the Laocoön, and corrugations between his brows.

People say I must be cold–natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self–contained in their daily lives.

But I wish to be enlightened.' 'Let me caution you against it.' 'Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?' 'Yes, indeed.' She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement.

The village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.

The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There's sommat in our blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound. ...

There was a certain scientific practicability even in his love-making, and it here came out excellently. 

there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.

She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.

The theologians, the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed statesmen, and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for me by the grind of stern reality!