Top 100 Quotes About Thomas Hardy
#1. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#2. And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. - THOMAS HARDY, FROM "THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN"(LINES ON THE LOSS OF TITANIC), 1912
Hazel Gaynor
#3. We late-lamented, resting here, Are mixed to human jam, And each to each exclaims in fear, 'I know not which I am!' " - Thomas Hardy, "The Levelled Churchyard," 1882
Deborah Crombie
#4. One of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Rebecca West
#5. I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.
Neil Gaiman
#6. English country life is more like Chekhov than 'The Archers' or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.
Jane Gardam
#7. I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
Seamus Heaney
#8. What about fateful turns in your life? Naturalists like Thomas Hardy proposed that some people are simply born under 'a blighted star' like his heroine in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. If so, then no matter what we did, we couldn't improve our lives.
Roger Leslie
#9. I avoided Thomas Hardy because everyone should, and anyway, I was depressed enough.
Jodi Taylor
#10. I sort of half read Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.' It was assigned in 10th grade, and I just couldn't get into it. About seven years later, I rediscovered Hardy and consumed four of his novels in a row.
Suzanne Collins
#11. Thomas Hardy once advised us to record impressions more and to express ideas less. Now and then I would remember this advice.
Mu Xin
#12. Like Thomas Hardy with his Casterbridge, my own fictional Pennington is based on a well-known English county town, which I embellish with buildings, parks, and houses from my imagination.
Catherine George
#13. There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is seeing something that isn't there. THOMAS HARDY
Erin Kelly
#14. I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.
Ben Elliot
#15. England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others ... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens ... I adopted them passionately.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#16. An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness
Thomas Hardy
#17. By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?
Thomas Hardy
#18. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.
Thomas Hardy
#19. How unexpected [are] the attacks of destiny!
Thomas Hardy
#20. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. The scales are balanced so nicely that a feather would turn them.
Thomas Hardy
#21. She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part - vistas of probable triumphs - the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won.
Thomas Hardy
#22. Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires.
Thomas Hardy
#23. Ah, a time of his life shall come when he will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn - as I do now!
Thomas Hardy
#24. Such poor liquor do make a man's throat feel very melancholy
and is a disgrace to the name of stimmilent.
Thomas Hardy
#25. Rays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts;
Thomas Hardy
#26. When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.
Thomas Hardy
#27. Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own - then,
Thomas Hardy
#28. And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman's most marked characteristic.
Thomas Hardy
#29. We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
Thomas Hardy
#30. The negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative
Thomas Hardy
#31. The social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.
Thomas Hardy
#32. Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
Thomas Hardy
#33. Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
Thomas Hardy
#34. My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
Thomas Hardy
#35. And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world's room, Oak walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders.
Thomas Hardy
#36. A great statesman thinks several times, and acts; a young lady acts, and thinks several times.
Thomas Hardy
#37. Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.
Thomas Hardy
#38. 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
#39. Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
Thomas Hardy
#40. A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
Thomas Hardy
#42. My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
Thomas Hardy
#43. We have missed because we tried to miss, I suppose.
Thomas Hardy
#44. A cloud that has gathered over us; though 'we have wronged no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no man!' Though perhaps we have 'done that which was right in our own eyes.
Thomas Hardy
#45. What are my books but one plea against "man's inhumanity to man" --to woman-- and to the lower animals?
Thomas Hardy
#46. There's more for us to think about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the sky ...
Thomas Hardy
#47. I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you," the farmer continued in an easier tone, "and put my rugged feeling into a graceful shape: but I have neither power nor patience to learn such things.
Thomas Hardy
#48. Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Thomas Hardy
#49. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
Thomas Hardy
#50. 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
#51. Why, you make anyone think that loving is a thing that can be done and undone, and put on and put off at a mere whim.
Thomas Hardy
#53. Away from courting me - " Gabriel expanded. "I'm sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear," he said, with a grateful sense of favours
Thomas Hardy
#54. The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.
Thomas Hardy
#55. There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behavior. When they want to be praised, which is often; when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom.
Thomas Hardy
#56. Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.
Thomas Hardy
#57. But it was also obvious that man could not live by work alone; that the particular man Jude, at any rate, wanted something to love.
Thomas Hardy
#58. Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast.
Thomas Hardy
#59. Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
Thomas Hardy
#60. If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
Thomas Hardy
#61. You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
Thomas Hardy
#62. How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them?
Thomas Hardy
#63. They washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water. "Which are my fingers and which are yours?" he said, looking up. "They are very much mixed." "They are all yours," said she, very prettily,
Thomas Hardy
#64. The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how.
Thomas Hardy
#65. That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down the
Thomas Hardy
#67. ( ... ) so that I could only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.
Thomas Hardy
#68. Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.
Thomas Hardy
#69. When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land, And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?
Thomas Hardy
#70. Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce disagreeable caricatures which spoil them. The
Thomas Hardy
#71. Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting.
Thomas Hardy
#72. She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.
Thomas Hardy
#73. I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly.
Thomas Hardy
#74. Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall - but what a wall!
Thomas Hardy
#75. Gabriel Oak: "It's time for you to fight your own battles... and win them too.
Thomas Hardy
#76. 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.
Thomas Hardy
#77. O, you have torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
Thomas Hardy
#78. Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said?
Thomas Hardy
#79. He resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady flow of this man's life.
Thomas Hardy
#80. Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
Thomas Hardy
#81. To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.
Thomas Hardy
#82. Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear.
Thomas Hardy
#83. They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
Thomas Hardy
#84. He walked from one window to another and became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company.
Thomas Hardy
#85. I think astronomy is a bad study for you. It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.
Thomas Hardy
#86. Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
Thomas Hardy
#87. The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from crown to toe.
Thomas Hardy
#88. Clare knew that she loved him - every curve of her form showed that - but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its single-mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaranteed, what honesty, what endurance, what good faith.
Thomas Hardy
#89. He had no wish to converse with her: that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough.
Thomas Hardy
#90. Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical time he did not answer: and they were again silent.
Thomas Hardy
#91. Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
Thomas Hardy
#92. Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.
Thomas Hardy
#93. With Sue as companion he could have renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should affect him disastrously.
Thomas Hardy
#94. Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
Thomas Hardy
#95. If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.
Thomas Hardy
#96. So do flux and reflux
the rhythm of change
alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
#97. Tis my belief she's a very good woman at bottom."
"She's terrible deep, then.
Thomas Hardy
#98. How did this remarkable reappearance effect itself when he was supposed by many to be at the bottom of the sea?
Thomas Hardy
#99. Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Thomas Hardy
#100. A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman.
Thomas Hardy
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