There was a change in Boldwood’s exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.

— Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

— Thomas Hardy

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

— Thomas Hardy

Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?

— Thomas Hardy

Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.

— Thomas Hardy

She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

— Thomas Hardy

A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.

— Thomas Hardy

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

— Thomas Hardy

Bless thy simplicity, Tess.

— Thomas Hardy

You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.

— Thomas Hardy

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

— Thomas Hardy

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.

— Thomas Hardy

You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

— Thomas Hardy

Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover’s most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover’s most venial sin.

— Thomas Hardy

I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

— Thomas Hardy

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

— Thomas Hardy

Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.

— Thomas Hardy

She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.

— Thomas Hardy

Done because we are too many.

— Thomas Hardy

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

— Thomas Hardy

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

— Thomas Hardy
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