She dismissed the past – trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.
She is lazy and dissatisfied. But that is not all of it. Supposing her to be as good a woman as any you can find, which she certainly is not, why do you wish to connect yourself with anybody at present?
And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong.
But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet.
The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side.
Rays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts;.
The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not adopting it.
You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall hate you!
I have been thinking,” she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, “that the social moulds 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 Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...
You were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!
The village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.
The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I don’t like to see the rooks and starlings in the fields, because I grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me. I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you my own dear! Come to me – come to me, and save me from what threatens me! – Your faithful heartbroken.
The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. The scales are balanced so nicely that a feather would turn them.
Tell me now, Angel, do you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know.” He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time. “O, Angel – I fear that means no!” said she, with a suppressed sob. “And I wanted so to see you again – so much, so much! What – not even you and I, Angel, who love each other so well?
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think.
Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life – a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself.
These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed.
When sorrow ceases to be speculative sleep sees her opportunity.