|
eb41847
|
It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure prove..
|
|
young-men
society
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
7c443f1
|
O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
b9c87bf
|
She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
ff4d974
|
Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
e68beca
|
I hate to be what is called a clever girl--there are too many of that sort now!
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
ed62172
|
Misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
0dfee4b
|
you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
|
|
woman
sensual
sue-bridehead
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
ad9d9bc
|
She heard footsteps brushing the grass, and had a consciousnesss that love was encircling her like a perfume.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
a44fbb3
|
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
|
|
love
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
17608b1
|
Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out--all of them writhing in agony except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more. With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself,..
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
3267a24
|
There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct - not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.
|
|
influence
change
willpower
inertia
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
57f3d53
|
Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of g..
|
|
woman
model
return-of-the-native
goddess
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
a0fbb70
|
How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
4144347
|
Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick good-night to these sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the world, the flesh, or the devil in their own hearts; only as something vague and external to themselves. He went to his own chamber. His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare opened it to discover her standing without, with a..
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
b8f4268
|
You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it.
|
|
sue-bridehead
flirt
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
474e40e
|
you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom--hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air!
|
|
phantom
tantalizing
sue-bridehead
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
34881b8
|
By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?"
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
8ea42b7
|
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")"
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
6cd008f
|
O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
0d7c52a
|
She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play
|
|
fate
serenity
powerlessness
surrender
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
3b5367e
|
Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!' 'For how long?' 'O - ever so long. Days and days.' 'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!' 'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.
|
|
reality-bites
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
7f2413c
|
Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
2fa542a
|
He waited day after day, saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
d39a5a2
|
Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
a39656d
|
So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to remain in obscurity.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
c89dc30
|
Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
5511f3e
|
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
|
|
light
landscape
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
db294be
|
I. At Tea THE kettle descants in a cosy drone, And the young wife looks in her husband's face, And then in her guest's, and shows in her own Her sense that she fills an envied place; And the visiting lady is all abloom, And says there was never so sweet a room. And the happy young housewife does not know That the woman beside her was his first choice, Till the fates ordained it could not be so.... Betraying nothing in look or voice The gues..
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
e3fe83a
|
Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales----Full of sound and fury --signifying nothing--he said no word at all.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
9ed21e7
|
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.
|
|
woman
memory
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
e65d09b
|
When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.
|
|
color
light
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
08fd539
|
Three Leahs to get to One Rachel.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
bf61ade
|
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?
|
|
parables
morals
stories
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
bdecdd0
|
The real sin ma'am, in my mind lies in thinking of ever wedding with a man you don't love honest and true.
|
|
wedding
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
65de822
|
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.
|
|
marriage
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
6d036f6
|
What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
1ab0167
|
I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there ..
|
|
youth
life
plans
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
bae55ee
|
Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
0db05ab
|
Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
baae42c
|
Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.
|
|
life
displacement
importance
experience
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
baae5a4
|
Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
3c4598a
|
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fello..
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
bbd3fbe
|
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 alone.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |
|
0ab0522
|
Here we suffer grief and pain, Here we meet to part again; In Heaven we part no more.
|
|
|
Thomas Hardy |