Thomas Hardy citations

Page 3

“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.”

“Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.”

“Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.”

“But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.”

“You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.”

“Many… have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”

“You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.”

“The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.”

“If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

“It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity”

“Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.”

“He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.”

“Some folks want their luck buttered.”

“I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman’s moments.”

“I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.”

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

“A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.”

“Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds”

“You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude.
And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they
were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade,
you'll suffer yet!”

“Bless thy simplicity, Tess”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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!”