She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.
Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?
If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church; Cubbert all College... Each brother candidly recognized there were a few unimportant scores of millions outside in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.
Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and positive pain.
Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and again, in all her colossal inconsistency.
She tried to pray to God, but it was her husband who really had her supplication. Her idolatry of this man was such that she herself almost feared it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion expressed by Friar Lawerence, “These violent delights have violent ends.” It might be too desperate for human conditions – too rank, too wild, too deadly.
He was young, and his face, if not exactly handsome, approached so near to handsome that nobody would have contradicted an assertion that it really was so in its natural colour.
What was the past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I became another woman, filled full of new life from you. How could I be the early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see that you was strong enough to work this change in me, you would perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.
More than ever he longed to be in some world where personal ambition was not the only recognized form of progress – such, perhaps, as might have been the case at some time or other in the silvery globe then shining upon him.
I thought you were the ghost of yourself.
Yes, ’tis rather a rum course,” said Venn, in the bland tone of one comfortably resigned to sins he could no longer overcome.
Eustacia, I don’t know where to look: my thoughts go through me like swords.
Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth.
The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature’s own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet of still life – if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing atmosphere – and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed.
Let me look right into your moonlit face, and dwell on every line and curve in it!
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
No. When I want a broad-minded opinion for general enlightenment, distinct from special advice, I never go to a man who deals in the subject professionally.
The best fiction is truer than history.
She had not meant him to translate her words about returning home so literally at the first; she had not intended him to learn her secret; but more than all she was not able to endure the perception of his learning it and continuing unmoved.
Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that to drawing down worlds!