He read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.
The curious double strands in Farfrae’s thread of life – the commercial and the romantic – were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.
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.
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.
Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting.
He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had lost all he possessed of worldly property; he had sunk from his modest elevation down to a lower ditch than that from which he had started; but he had now a dignified calm he had never known before and that indifference to fate. And thus the abasement had been an exaltation and the loss gain.
She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.
I want something that makes people strong and energetic for the present, that borrows the strength of to-morrow for use to-day – leaving to-morrow without any at all for that matter; or even that would take all life away to-morrow, so long as it enabled me to get home again now.
Hastily flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night was now clear.
If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later.
Jude waited at all the evening downstairs. At a very late hour the intelligence was bought to him that a child had been prematurely born, and that it, like the others, was a corpse.
Her suspense was terrible.
Dazzled by brass and scarlet – O, Bathsheba – this is a woman’s folly indeed!
No average man will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look “Come on” he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes.
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.
Matter is matter, and mental association only a delusion.
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.
This good-fellowship – camaraderie – usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely.
I have danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile and many a long day.
Weakness is doubly weak by being new.