Quotes by Thomas Hardy

“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.”

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”

“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 convict...”

“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 ...”

“And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for mans finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.”

“At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals a...”

“I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don...”

“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...”

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”

“Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habi...”

“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!”

“Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly ...”

“You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.”

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

“If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.”

“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”

“...the social mould 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. I am called Mrs. Richard ...”

“This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in thei...”

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

“Life with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't...”