Thomas Hardy: Trending quotes

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“Bless thy simplicity, Tess”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

“So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

“It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Teach me to live, that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Teach me to die…”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

“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

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“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 book A Pair of Blue Eyes

Source: A Pair of Blue Eyes

“A novel is an impression, not an argument.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure

“There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. V, ch. 3
The Return of the Native (1878)

“These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.”

Thomas Hardy

Hap http://www.poetry-online.org/hardy_hap.htm" (1866), lines 13-14, from Wessex Poems (1898)

“"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.”

Thomas Hardy book Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment, ch. LIX (last lines)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

“For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.”

Thomas Hardy book A Pair of Blue Eyes

A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), ch. 9

“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 book Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Phase the Second: Maiden No More, ch. XIV
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Pt. VI, ch. III
Jude the Obscure (1895)

“[Of a wedding:] And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Pt. I, ch. IX
Jude the Obscure (1895)

“My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”

Thomas Hardy The Dynasts

Pt. II, sc. v, Spirit Sinister
The Dynasts (1904–1908)

“What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?
It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance.”

Thomas Hardy The Dynasts

Pt. I, forescene, Shade of the Earth & Spirit of the Years
The Dynasts (1904–1908)

“The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. I, ch. 1
The Return of the Native (1878)