Thomas Hardy

“That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!”

“How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”

“So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.”

“Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.”

“I. At TeaTHE kettle descants in a cosy drone,And the young wife looks in her husband's face,And then in her guest's, and shows in her ownHer sense that she fills an envied place;And the visiting lady is all abloom,And says there was never so sweet a room.And the happy young housewife does not knowThat the woman beside her was his first choice,Till the fates ordained it could not be so....Betraying nothing in look or voiceThe guest sits smiling and sips her tea,And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.”

“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.”

“Half an hour afterwards Dick emerged from the inn, and if Fancy's lips had been real cherries, probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.”

“I was court-martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.”

“Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.”

“and yet to every bad, there is a worse”

“They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.”

“He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of character; but, being without the power to combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless grooves through unheeding the comprehension.”

“The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself. It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.”

“To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating.”

“Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds”

“He resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady flow of this man's life.”

“A man's body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained.”

“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.”

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.”

“How strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.”

“That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.”

“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.”

“My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.”

“It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.”

“They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they.”

“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.”

“Though not fearful of measurable dangers, she feared the unknown.”

“When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.”

“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.”

“She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.”

“The stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the room.”

“A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.”

“Don't that make your bosom plim?”

“You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.”

“Bless thy simplicity, Tess”

“The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.”

“Behind him the hill are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless.”

“So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to remain in obscurity.”

“He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.”

“It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness,”

“George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.”

“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.”

“I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else. ”

“Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out—all of them writhing in agony except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more. With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself, Tess’s first thought was to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found them till the gamekeepers should come, as they probably would come, to look for them a second time. “Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o’ such misery as yours!” she exclaimed, her tears running down as she killed the birds tenderly.”

“It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity”

“[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait. . . . Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.”

“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.”

“you temptress,Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon- I could not resist you as soon as I met you again.”

“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.”

“Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.”