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Quotes About Time

Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life;
~ Thomas Hardy
That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.
~ Thomas Hardy
He waited day after day, saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting.
~ Thomas Hardy
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!
~ Thomas Hardy
She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play
~ Thomas Hardy
Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!' 'For how long?' 'O - ever so long. Days and days.' 'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!' 'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.
~ Thomas Hardy
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
~ Thomas Hardy
Tess was awake before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
~ Thomas Hardy
But time is short, and science is infinite...
~ Thomas Hardy
On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
~ Thomas Hardy
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
~ Thomas Hardy
Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will live on a long time after nutriment has ceased
~ Thomas Hardy
They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
~ Thomas Hardy
The clock struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts.
~ Thomas Hardy
I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bygone look.
~ Thomas Hardy
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet
~ Thomas Hardy
the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.
~ Thomas Hardy
there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would had disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there
~ Thomas Hardy
I am now about to enter on my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise.
~ Thomas Hardy
An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness
~ Thomas Hardy
I am sorry to shock you, she said. But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and thirty years.
~ Thomas Hardy
The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.
~ Thomas Hardy
the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
~ Thomas Hardy
But nobody did come, because nobody does;
~ Thomas Hardy