Thomas Hardy citations

Page 2

“Pourquoi ne m'avez-vous pas dit qu'il y avait du danger avec les hommes?"
Tess”

“La femme n'étonne jamais autant son compagnon que par cette étrange capacité qu'elle possède de croire en des cajoleries qu'elle sait fausses - sauf, à dire vrai, quand elle se montre ouvertement sceptique vis-à-vis de remarques qu'elle sait être vraies.”

“Le charme principal, l’unique charme peut-être du visage de la jeune femme était sa mobilité. Quand elle baissait les yeux pour regarder l’enfant, elle devenait jolie et même belle, d’autant que les fauves rayons du couchant, en frappant alors obliquement ses traits, mettaient des transparences délicates sur ses paupières et ses narines, et une flamme sur ses lèvres. Quand, au contraire, elle marchait dans l’ombre de la haie, toute à sa rêverie silencieuse, elle prenait l’expression passive et figée de ceux qui attendent tout du Temps et du Destin, tout sauf un peu de justice. Le premier aspect était l’œuvre de la Nature, le second celui de la civilisation, sans doute.”

“This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?”

“Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.”

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

“So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope….”

“I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!”

“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.”

“Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?”

“Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail…”

“We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.”

“If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.”

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

“A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.”

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

“But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.”

“Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession”

“Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.”

“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.”

“Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?”

“… she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.”

“It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out
of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a
short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.”

“It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness”

“That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!”

“I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.”

“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”

“To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.”

“Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied sould of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way to say a little is often to tell more than to say.”

“There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.”

“and yet to every bad, there is a worse”