Thomas Hardy Quotes

221 Sourced Quotes

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!...I do not deserve my lot!...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!

Thomas Hardy
Why doth IT so and so, and ever so,
This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

Thomas Hardy
Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.

Thomas Hardy
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

Thomas Hardy
It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.

Thomas Hardy
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")

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

Thomas Hardy
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love 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 any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

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
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Thomas Hardy
Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.

Thomas Hardy
Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.

Thomas Hardy
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly.

Thomas Hardy
You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.

Thomas Hardy
When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness.

Thomas Hardy
She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

Thomas Hardy
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

Thomas Hardy
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; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.

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

Thomas Hardy
What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?" "Yes, dearest," he said. "They have come." "It is as it should be," she murmured. "Angel, I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!" She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved. "I am ready," she said quietly.

Thomas Hardy
The regular resource of people who don't go enough into the world to live a novel is to write one.

Thomas Hardy
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.

Thomas Hardy
There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

Thomas Hardy
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Thomas Hardy
To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.

Thomas Hardy
The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race?
By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:
Such world I fashioned not.

Thomas Hardy
O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

Thomas Hardy
Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"

Thomas Hardy
This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I.

Thomas Hardy
The figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.

Thomas Hardy