The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
(Everyman, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
In high school and university The Return of the Native was one of my favorite books. My admiration set me off on a spree of Hardy novel reading. I still like it although I feel differently about it now. I favored it originally because of other feelings and experiences associated with the time and place of first reading.
Love is the dismallest thing where the lover is quite honest.
(page 98)
... a slow fire could blaze on occasion.
(page 109)
... the dignity of a necessary performance.
(pages 129-130)
... the age of modern man is to be measured by the intensity of his history.
(page 165)
... thought is a disease of flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things.
(page 166)
Many a man’s love has been a curse to him.
(page 236)
How terrible it would be if a time should come when I could not love you.
(page 240)
Pleasure not known beforehand is half wasted; to anticipate it is to double it.
(page 246)
To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary of that offered; to care for the remote, to dislike the near; ... This is the true mark of the man of sentiment.
(page 258)
The vision of what ought to have been is thrown side in sheer weariness, and brow-beaten human endeavour listlessly makes the best of the face that is.
(page 260)
It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.
(page 297)
Their troubles are of their own making.
(page 326)
Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life.
(page 329)
Men are given to the trick of having a passing fancy for somebody else in the midst of a permanent love, which reasserts itself afterwards just as before.
(page 339)
We have been hot lovers in our time, but it won’t do now. Good-bye.
(page 342)
What makes death painful except the thought of others’ grief?
(page 403)
When a woman in such a situation, neither old, deaf, crazed, nor whimsical, takes upon herself to sob and soliloquize aloud there is something grievous the matter.
(page 426)
I am getting used to the horror of my existence.
(page 453)
... to be born is a palpable dilemma, and ... instead of men aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out of it without shame.
(page 459)
Resources do not depend upon gross amounts, but upon the proportion of spendings to takings.
(page 459)
... what a man has once been he may be again. ... Except that it is rather harder now.
(page 471)