Thomas Hardy Quotes - Page 2

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.

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

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

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.

But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are.

-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...

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

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.

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.

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly

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.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession

It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.

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

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.

Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.

People who have always gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong.

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.