Quotes by Thomas Hardy

About Thomas Hardy:

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Thomas Hardy

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.

Thomas Hardy

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

Thomas Hardy

It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.

Thomas Hardy

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

Thomas Hardy

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as...

Thomas Hardy

Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires.

Thomas Hardy

I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.

Thomas Hardy

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 sw...

Thomas Hardy

[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women w...

Thomas Hardy

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps...

Thomas Hardy

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

Thomas Hardy

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more.

Thomas Hardy

I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!

Thomas Hardy

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.

Thomas Hardy

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.

Thomas Hardy

The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.

Thomas Hardy

There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of...

Thomas Hardy

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.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

Thomas Hardy

Author Bio

  • NameThomas Hardy
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist and poet
  • BornJune 2, 1840
  • DiedJanuary 11, 1928
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPoet; Writer; Novelist
  • WorksTess Of The D'Urbervilles; Far From The Madding Crowd; Jude The Obscure
  • AwardsOrder Of Merit