Quotes by Thomas Hardy

“The flowers in the brides hand are sadly like the garland which decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. Thats what some women fail to...”

“I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bride...”

“I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly ! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick.... When people of a later age look back upon the ...”

“And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had be...”

“Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction n...”

“There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.”

“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.”

“As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is ...”

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

“Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm.”

“Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what w...”

“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.”

“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”

“The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the idea...”

“Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then.”

“The world is as it used to be:All nations striving strong to makeRed war yet redder. Mad as hattersThey do no more for Christs sakeThan you who are helpless in such matters.That this is not the jud...”

“...there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.”

“Joan Durbeyfield always manged to find consolation somewhere: 'Well, as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump car aright. And if he don't marry her af...”

“It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow u...”

“I have been thinking that the social moulds civilisation 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...”