Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
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.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…
But no one came. Because no one ever does.
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.
A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes
Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.
You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.
So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope....
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.
Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?
Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession
...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
All romances end at marriage.
It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness,
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
And yet to every bad, there is a worse
Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.
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.
They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
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.
If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
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.
I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman’s moments.
Some folks want their luck buttered.
Bless thy simplicity, Tess
When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity
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.
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 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.
A novel is an impression, not an argument.
Done because we are too many.
It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
I forgot the defective can be more than the whole
Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Good, better, best Never let it rest, Till ur good is better And better is best.
Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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.
--the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man...
Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die…
I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.
She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
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
O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
Always wanting another man than your own.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else.
She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.
They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they.
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.
I hate to be what is called a clever girl--there are too many of that sort now!
O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")
