Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
23 quotes
"...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes"
"So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky."
"Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe."
"It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin."
"Joan Durbeyfield always manged to find consolation somewhere: 'Well, as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump car aright. And if he don't marry her afore he will after. For that he's all afire wi' love for her any eye can see.' 'What's her trump card? Her d'Urberville blood, you mean?' 'No, stupid; her face - as 'twas mine."
"Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?"
"He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things."
"Tess was awake before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken."
"That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times."
"My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all."
"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."
"It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet."
"When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines."
"Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself."
"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"
"Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences."
"She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct."
"I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger."
"All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight."
"I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!"
"The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units."
"The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more."
"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?""Yes.""All like ours?""I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted.""Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?""A blighted one."