This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak.
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
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.
There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it Tess?
Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Some folk want their luck buttered.
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
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.
It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.