Thomas Hardy
People go on marrying because they can't resist natural
forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly
buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.
Jude the Obscure
But no one came. Because no one ever does.
Jude the Obscure
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man
cannot see close?
The Return of the Native
Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe
visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave
excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they
had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women;
they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they
have only heard. We call it intuition.
The Return of the Native
Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about
[history] than I know already. [...] Because what's the use of learning that I
am one of a long row only--finding out that there is set down in some old book
somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me
sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and you past
doings have been kist like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life
and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'. [...] I shouldn't mind
learning why--why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike, [...] but
that's what books will not tell me.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
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. Nature does not often say "See!" to her
poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply
"Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and-seek
has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and
summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer
intuition, a close interaction of the social machinery than that which now
jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or
even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it
was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the
perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth
waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit
delay sprang anxieties,disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and
passing-strange destinies.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
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.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
She might have seen that what had bowed her head so
profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on
an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of
sensations, to anybody but herself.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
