by Thomas Hardy
(Penguin, 1998)
The world is only a psychological phenomenon.
- page 85.
The magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
- page 154.
His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative.
- page 174.
...’tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time’tis convenient.
- page 201.
I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!
- page 232.
Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things!
- page 271.
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.
- page 340.
Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow.
` - page 341.
Violent motion relied on thought.
- page 346.
She seduced attention precisely because she did not demand it.
- page 503 (Appendix V)