To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction – every kind of evidence in the logician’s list – have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite alone.
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.
You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always.
It was a fatal omission of Boldwood’s that he had never once told her she was beautiful.
Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.
He is a sort of steady man in a wild way, you know. That’s better than to be as some are, wild in a steady way. I am afraid that’s how I am.
She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were cast.
His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman’s looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations.
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 was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.
I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability.
Having begun to love you, I love you for ever – in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself.
Love has its own dark morality when rivalry enters in.
I think of people more kindly when I am away from them.
To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country’s history;.
We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by;.
One’s pretty lively when ruined.
Two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience.
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.
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet.
He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.