Thomas Hardy - Woman Quotes

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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Thomas Hardy
How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?

Thomas Hardy
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

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

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
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
So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

Thomas Hardy
To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

Thomas Hardy
To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.

Thomas Hardy
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

Thomas Hardy
It is hard for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Thomas Hardy
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order

Thomas Hardy
But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience.

Thomas Hardy
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Thomas Hardy
Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.

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

Thomas Hardy
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Thomas Hardy
Here by the baring bough
Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
Springtime deceives,—
I, an old woman now,
Raking up leaves.

Thomas Hardy