“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”

“Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else.”

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

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

“It being the first time in his life that he had touched female fingers under water, Dick duly registered the sensation as rather a nice one.”

“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

“...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.”