Thomas Hardy

How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?

There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!

When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.

A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, …

The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be only partially before his time—to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted …

"Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live for—that's all is the matter with me!"

To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a …

Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial globe.

The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, …

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.

Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.

You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

All romances end at marriage.

A nice unparticular man.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up, there will be you.

Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, …

The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the …