Quotes About Thomas Hardy

In their gestures and faces there were anxieties, affection, agony of heart - all for a man who had wronged them - had never really behaved towards either of them anyhow but selfishly.

He spoke in squarely shaped sentences, and was supremely satisfied with a condition of sublunary things which made weapons a necessity.

Tess Durberyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience

Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly enough, what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would have to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on him.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan—a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society; and the possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference only to the future. He

been awakened to woman's privileges in tergiversation

I don't possess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

The mistake of expressing them had arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles to the disregard of the particular instance.

in his view there could come of his interference nothing worse than what existed at present. And yet to every bad there is a worse.

the voice was unexpectedly attractive...common in descriptions, rare in experince.

So little cause for carolingsOf such ecstatic soundWas written on terrestrial thingsAfar or nigh around,That I could think there trembled throughHis happy good-night airSome blessed hope, whereof he knewAnd I was unaware.

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.

That cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.

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.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a book about eggs he told me to be sure to mention how in Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" the young Arabella incubates a sky-blue egg of a song bird in the cleavage of her bosom ... When I checked, I was disappointed to find it wasn't a song thrush egg, but that of a chicken ... The original image in my mind disintegrated like the sound of a vinyl record after the power has been turned off.

If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.

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