Thomas Hardy Quotes - Page 24 | Just Great DataBase

Now mind, you have a mistress instead of a master. I don't yet know my powers or my talents in farming; but I shall do my best, and if you serve me well, so shall I serve you. Don't any unfair ones among you (if there are any such, but I hope not) suppose that because I'm a woman I don't understand the difference between bad goings-on and good."   (All.)

It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope: when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise.   The

away from courting me— Gabriel expanded. I’m sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear, he said, with a grateful sense of favours

How did this remarkable reappearance effect itself when he was supposed by many to be at the bottom of the sea?

The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself.

Five years, nine months, and a few days. Fifteen months nearly have passed since he vanished, and is there anything so wonderful in an engagement of little more than five years?

That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction—every kind of evidence in the logician's list—have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation. Farmer

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage

The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.

It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.

in the month-by-month process of editorial criticism and censorship, Hardy never lost his fierce contempt for all forms of ‘tampering with natural truth

You are nothing to me—nothing," said Troy, heartlessly. "A ceremony before a priest doesn't make a marriage. I am not morally yours.

In about the time a person unaccustomed to bodily labour would have decided upon which side to lie, Farmer Oak was asleep.   The

love, life and everything human seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe'. (p.309)

For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man.

This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.

Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and went off with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A few minutes later, when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray came back again in a hurry. Flourishing his finger ominously he threw a gaze teeming with tidings just where his eye alighted by accident, which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass's face.

She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them.

Oak was just thinking that whatever hehimself might have suffered from Bathsheba's marriage, here was aman who had suffered more, when Boldwood spoke in a changedvoice—that of one who yearned to make a confidence and relieve hisheart by an outpouring.