FastSaying

Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?


Thomas Hardy

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"Yes, dearest," he sa...
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THOMAS HARDY How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality...
THOMAS HARDY Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere...
THOMAS HARDY Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about [history] than I know already. [...] Becau...
THOMAS HARDY I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only ...
THOMAS HARDY My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
THOMAS HARDY This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
THOMAS HARDY The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses...
THOMAS HARDY Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…
THOMAS HARDY Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard again...
THOMAS HARDY Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but ...
THOMAS HARDY Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
THOMAS HARDY A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
THOMAS HARDY You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. A...
THOMAS HARDY ...it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall b...
THOMAS HARDY The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views up...
THOMAS HARDY My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial inte...
THOMAS HARDY you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom--hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I al...
THOMAS HARDY Had other aims than my delight.
THOMAS HARDY Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
THOMAS HARDY Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line -- less dir...
THOMAS HARDY Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements...
THOMAS HARDY On a Fine Morning”
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

WHENCE comes Solac...
THOMAS HARDY The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of...
THOMAS HARDY Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or ...
THOMAS HARDY She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the...
THOMAS HARDY The beggarly question of parentage--what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to thi...
THOMAS HARDY My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
THOMAS HARDY He had just reached the time of life at which 'young' is ceasing to be the prefix of 'man' in speaki...
THOMAS HARDY But no one came. Because no one ever does.
THOMAS HARDY My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
THOMAS HARDY The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the cou...
THOMAS HARDY And yet to every bad there is a worse.
THOMAS HARDY That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
THOMAS HARDY Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-relia...
THOMAS HARDY The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle ...
THOMAS HARDY