Thomas Hardy Quotes - Page 2

Her suspense was terrible.
Thomas Hardy
Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires.
Thomas Hardy
It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called-- were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies. You may ridicule me--I am quite willing that you should-- I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew"--he nodded towards the college at which the dons were severally arriving--"it is just possible they would do the same.
Thomas Hardy
Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.
Thomas Hardy
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
Thomas Hardy
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.
Thomas Hardy
She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.
Thomas Hardy
She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.
Thomas Hardy
And strange-eyed constellations reignHis stars eternally.
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
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing.
Thomas Hardy
The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more.
Thomas Hardy
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
Thomas Hardy
The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.
Thomas Hardy
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.
Thomas Hardy
You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always
Thomas Hardy
I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!
Thomas Hardy
All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.
Thomas Hardy
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?
Thomas Hardy
Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.
Thomas Hardy
I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!
Thomas Hardy
you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Thomas Hardy
being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.
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
Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.
Thomas Hardy
Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.
Thomas Hardy
Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.
Thomas Hardy
If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later.
Thomas Hardy
We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks whilst a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek.
Thomas Hardy
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
Thomas Hardy
Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occassional laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride - the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won from all other women - unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted.
Thomas Hardy
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.
Thomas Hardy
An average woman is in this superior to an average man—that she never instigates, only responds.
Thomas Hardy
Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration.
Thomas Hardy
Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.
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
Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.
Thomas Hardy
And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.
Thomas Hardy
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
Thomas Hardy
Don't that make your bosom plim?
Thomas Hardy
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting outof love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as ashort cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
Thomas Hardy
When I want a broad-minded opinion for general enlightenment, distinct from special advice, I never go to a man who deals in the subject professionally. So I like the parson's opinion on law, the lawyer's on doctoring, the doctor's on business, and my business-man's . . . on morals.
Thomas Hardy
Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.
Thomas Hardy
Though fervent was our vow,Though ruddily ran our pleasure,Bliss has fulfilled its measure,And sees its sentence now.Ache deep; but make no moans:Smile out; but stilly suffer:The paths of love are rougherThan thoroughfares of stones.
Thomas Hardy
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.
Thomas Hardy
But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are.
Thomas Hardy
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.
Thomas Hardy
Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.
Thomas Hardy
Always wanting another man than your own.
Thomas Hardy
When the love-led man had ceased from his labours Bathsheba came and looked him in the face.'Gabriel, will you you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon.'I will,' said Gabriel.And she smiled on him again.
Thomas Hardy
I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer.
Thomas Hardy
Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.
Thomas Hardy
It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.
Thomas Hardy
Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf manobserving people listening to music. You say 'What are theyregarding? Nothing is there.' But something is.
Thomas Hardy
This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely.
Thomas Hardy
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
Thomas Hardy
When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.
Thomas Hardy
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
Thomas Hardy
She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.
Thomas Hardy
As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray.
Thomas Hardy